Entrepreneurial Principles: Eighteen Sustainable Revenue Channels (for an online community website)

When operating a website, the first revenue people can think of is advertisement. David Silver provides us with a lot more revenue channels below:

1. Sponsorship/Powerby: Advertising on your website. Focus on long-term advertisement. It would be even greater if you can attract one of them to be more like your "partner".
   
2. Subscription fee: This channel should be set up after a year or so, only after the members see the value of the community.
3. Tips jar: The community should encourage members to support each others.
4. Reputation management fee: Publish good or bad deeds that the members do. This is a demanding task. So it is fair the charge the members.
5. Slice and dice the conversation: Anonymously process the conversation and sell the insight to the vendors.
6. The J. D. Power Business Model: J. D. Power provides marketing information service. It studies products and services by surveying the market and drawing insightful results. Your community can do something similar. You can ask the members to study a product, and sell the results to the vendors.
7. Port the Community to Mobile Phones: When your community is big enough, you can create a customized software for mobiles, talk to the mobile operator,  and asks them for revenue share. 
8. Kudos: Derived from a Greek word, kudos means "fame''. Members can choose to rewards others by giving kudos instead of tips.
9. Users Group Meetings: User group meeting is probably the ultimate desired result of an online recommender community. When you have enough members, you may propose to have an actual group meeting. Here, you can invite members or famous people to talk about related topics. You can earn revenue as follows.
•     The members pay for traveling and admission fee. 
•     Sell the event tickets to product vendors and service providers.
•     Rent out exhibition booths.
10. Synthetic Currency: Make your own currency for various purchasing various things such as tips, kudos, your community's products, actual product in local retailers
11. Affiliate Ad Networks: Get on TV shows. Look for a news section which presents interesting products, services (e.g., websites), or events (e.g., technological seminar). The airtime for this kind of shows is not very expensive, and the audience might be interested in the conversation of the community. You can ask your sponsors to pay for the airtime and put their logo on the show.
12. Validating business: When your community gets strong enough, it will act as a validating platform. By then, you can issue "approved by" stickers and sale them to the local retailers. 
13. Setting Up a Not-for-Profit: Set up a group to raise funds (e.g., Disaster relief fund), and let your community collect fund management fee.
14. Prepaid Credit Cards: This revenue channel requires you to make a deal with a credit card company, say, VISA. VISA will issue the credit card with the community logo on the credit card. Upon closing the deal, the community will have few more revenue channels:
• Annual fee
• A share of transaction fee payable to the merchants
• A share of cash advanced fee payable to the cardholders (i.e., members)
15. Product Branding: When a company wants to launch a new product, it can hire your community to review or even design the marketing plan.

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About the summary: It takes time to finish up a book. And, when you do, sometimes, you want to review what you learn from the book. If you do not make notes as you read, you might have to go through the book once again. This can be time-consuming when you are dealing with a book. But you can still flip through the book and locate what you are looking for

However, when the material is an audiobook, it is extremely hard to locate a specific part of content. Most likely you will have to listen to the entire audiobook once again.

This book summary will help solve the pain of having to go through the book all over again.

I am leaving out the details of the books. Most books have interesting examples and case studies, not included here. Reading the original book would be much more entertaining and enlightening. If you like the summary, you may want to get the original from the source below.

Source: Social Network Business Model by David Silver, Chapter 1.