“Alternative” Profitable Models for Web-based Commerce
The Main Document
This is a list of some business models for Web-based commerce that do not require depending on intrusive advertising:
Ask for money for “real-life” public appearances (See this post).
The freemium model (for example of Flickr) - charge users for a premium account with some advantages.
The model of Bandcamp and the Humble Bundles: pay what you want (possibly above a minimum) for a download.
The “Cloud” model - pay for hosting or an MMORPG account or a different “Software-as-a-service” subscription.
Pay to exempt works, which are licensed under restrictive licences (e.g: under the CC-by-nc-sa or strong copyleft FOSS licences such as the GPL) from various restrictions. Alternatively, one can collect donations to relicense the work under a less restrictive licence — for everyone.
Sell merchandise. Here’s a very fun video about it from the film Spaceballs.
One can also set up non-intrusive ads like those provided by Project Wonderful but I doubt it will be very profitable.
Give relatively low quality versions of the artworks, free of charge and charge money for access to higher quality versions. For example: like Ghosts I-IV by Nine Inch Nails.
Bylaws-permitting: collect donations.
Licence
This document is Copyright by Shlomi Fish, 2015, and is made available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial ShareAlike License (CC-by-nc-sa) 3.0 Unported (or at your option any later version).
For securing additional rights, please contact Shlomi Fish and see the explicit requirements that are being spelt from abiding by that licence.
See Also
“A handy guide to financial support for open source” - a comprehensive document on GitHub.
The Commercial Fan-fiction Initiative
“So, who the Hell is Qoheleth?” - An Illustrated Screenplay - A blast from the past.