Triple Play Future for Web Business Models

Where are Web business models headed? Towards a mix of advertising, subscription and transaction models, says Bernard Lunn ReadWriteWeb COO. There are some obvious implications.

Advertisers will adopt a barbell approach: where they will buy media on a traditional cost-per-thousand basis for branding and cost-per-action for direct-revenue generation, he says. Cost per click will still be dominated by Google but will become less dominant as CPA gains traction, Lunn argues.

The big issue, though, is that Google so dominates the CPC business that it makes tough any other third party CPA model. Lunn thinks ad-suported media will be a mix of CPM and CPA models, but must deal with CPC to achieve a workable balance.

Content increasingly will be dominated by user-generated sources, if only because the amount of professionally-created content is not going to keep up with the amount of UGC. To make UGC consumable, more human editing will be required.

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/mapping_the_current_web_transition.php