How will a message board Internet site make money?
The business model that I most favor for profitability is one of sponsorship of an entire site, or sponsorship of individual threads. In this model, it helps to think of a message board as the equivalent of the town square from times gone by. In those days, the town square was actually sponsored by the town itself, with maintenance and beautification paid for and performed by town employees or volunteer groups. It is not difficult to imagine a similar scenario for an Internet site, where the sponsor covers major expenses (equipment costs, power costs, etc.) and the site is staffed by volunteers, whose work helps immensely in controlling labor costs. The sponsors' payback is in users viewing offers/viewpoints (where the sponsor has absolute control over what the community "sees"), or a readily available community to track trends in consumer spending or consumer interests. Perhaps the sponsor can even get referral fees for some forms of advertising, or make money on direct sales of the sponsor's own products/services or products/services offered by a third-party but retailed on the sponsor's site. And of course, we're talking about a commercial sponsor to this point. There is nothing in the rules to preclude a government sponsorship, such as the Feds sponsoring something along these lines, supported by taxpayer dollars, similar to the way our National Parks system used to run. Eventually, user fees might be necessary to rein in abusive usage by individuals or commercial entities. It could work, but a government sponsored site would likely be non-profit...
I think the old advertising model alone has been shown to generate insufficient revenues for profitability. And the same can be said for the user fees type of model, such as Silicon Investor uses, and Motley Fool has begun to use. These models are more reminiscent of a newspaper type of business model, and although that model worked for newspapers, costs are catching up with them, as other media can deliver the same news quicker and with less expense involved.
Some sites, such as Yahoo! (which, for the most part, is still an advertising model) are slowly migrating to user fees to augment revenues, but I think this will be a case of "too little, too late". And other sites will attempt to become a hybrid, using advertising revenues and user fees to underwrite costs, with the eventual goal of turning a profit. The problem with the hybrid model is that it requires many multiples of eyeballs to be registering page views to satisfy advertiser's needs, and there probably aren't that many folks around willing to pay user fees unless they have some input or control over content. And since most user's despise advertising, there will exist a conflict of desires between the advertising and the user communities.
Of the existing message boards, only AOL seems to have a profitable model, and that is largely because they have bundled the costs of messaging with the costs of offering ISP services, which is in itself, a form of sponsorship...
KJC |
