This week’s eComm study looks at the write up by Bagley and Martin regarding BitTorrent and Warner Bros‘ partnership in P2P video distribution (circa 2005). I have to be honest here, Bagley and Martin leave something to be desired in their write-up. So, in efforts to make this somewhat enjoyable, let’s take a different angle and actually ask a question to respond to the BitTorrent v. and Warner Bros. partnership.
First, the RIAA and MPAA are all over this area. Kudos to Cohen and Navin for wanting to make a business out of P2P file sharing. I given them credit – in 2005 the lawsuits were really just starting. Our BFFs were handing out take-down notices left and right by time BT & WB …
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This week I take a look at what Stanford (or HBS) in 2005 called ezboard, but today is known as Yoku. Yoku is an online discussion board platform, no different than Ning, Yahoo! Message Boards, or even (a stretch perhaps) Google Groups. The question posed is: how does Yoku make money? Many discussion boards, like those above, are free – and now even more open source technologies exist that hosts can install themselves (Vanilla, BBPress, etc.).
Yoku makes money in two ways: ad-based revenue shown in headers and footers, and subscriptions via their Gold Ad-Free Community. For communities with less than 50,000 page views / month, the gold plan at $6/month removes the ads from the …
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It will have been six months this Friday since my last post and I have a new source of motivation for blogging – so “Hello World.” Over the course of the next 15 weeks I’ll be finishing my second (yes, second) master’s degree. I’m wrapping up my MBA from George Mason. As a part of my final classes, I’m doing my first official, academic study of eCommerce. The course is going to look at about a dozen companies in the online world (all still online at the writing of this post – I think…) and how they formulate their business, approach their customers, and perhaps, just perhaps make money (looking at you Twitter – yup, looking right at you). I’ve followed the best…
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