Where does an online community make money?
It connects buyers and sellers on the web and provides value by offering
content in the form of advice, personal service or other benefits. In
Internet parlance, it’s playing the role of a content aggregator
that offers information, knowledge, or any experience that adds value
to a particular e-business transaction.
It focuses on numerous partnerships, on maintaining extensive content
and promoting the site and its services to potential buyers and sellers.
The main sources of revenues are commission, advertising, tenancy deals,
and supply-side subscriptions.
By offering specialized content/information within a vertical industry,
like vertical.net they create value by reducing the time and complexity
of transactions. Vertical.net, one of the fastest growing facilitators
of industry-specific content for B2B commerce on the net brings buyers
and sellers from a particular industry together. It’s website, wateronline
attracts more than 100,000 visitors a month. With services like latest
news, online directories, personalized advertisements, targeted email
newsletters of products and services, and a facility to create an individual
company website within the main portal makes it a major commerce facilitator.
Personalized advertising, hosting websites, building and designing websites,
sponsoring discussion forums, and negotiating a percentage of each transaction
that takes place on the online marketplace form a part of any portal.
Such sites may not start with too many transactions happening, but as
they capture valuable buyer and seller information in the matching process,
there exists immense opportunity to make their portal an e-commerce hub
for that particular vertical. Sponsor loyalty enables this while customer
loyalty follows.
As long as there is an industry with a lack of knowledge and ignorance
about prices and performance of products, there will exist a profit zone
for portals of this kind. (autobytel.com, autoweb.com, Get-smart.com,
E-loan)
What are the functions of a portal?
Aggregation of needs
Aggregation of services
Negotiation and notification services
Consulting services
Creating demand
Matchmaking
Up selling
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Community software 2004 |