Using e-commerce to sell information

There's lots of money to be made online, but not all of this involves selling goods in the traditional way. Many online businesses try to make money by offering a mixture of free and premium services. Yahoo! (which originally stood for Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle), is probably the best-known example of a website like this. Created as a comprehensive directory of other websites, it mutated into a search engine and then a portal, offering a gateway to all kinds of other premium services. For example, you can get free e-mail through Yahoo!, but you can also pay extra for a more sophisticated e-mail system; you can store your photographs for free on Yahoo's Flickr site, but you can pay an extra sum to have them printed out or processed in various ways.

Newspapers, magazines, and book publishers also try to make money through a mixture of free and premium services. While most of them offer their basic content (the horrible, unappealing name that online businesses give to the words and pictures they publish) for free, using advertising to make money, some also offer a proportion of their articles for a one-off fixed fee or subscription). Buying an article involves a transaction similar to the ones you'd make on Amazon or eBay, so this kind of online publishing is also clearly a variety of e-commerce.

Go to task: WEB MARKETING