Overview of business models for Web 2.0 communities

Abstract

A new type of communities is gaining momentum on the web and is reshaping online communication and collaboration patterns and the way how information is consumed and produced [Gros04, Kolb06]. Examples of such communities are Wikipedia, MySpace, OpenBC, YouTube, Folksonomies, numerous Weblogs and others. In literature different terms can be found to denote the emerging and growing new phenomenon: social software [Bäch06] or peer production [Scho05]. In the year 2005, Tim O'Reilly popularized the term Web 2.0 [O'Reil05]. While the first two terms can be applied also to earlier, already established forms of online communities (for an overview see [Stan02]), the term Web 2.0 is mostly applied to emphasize the differences of emerging communities compared to earlier forms of online communities, encompassing various perspectives - technology, attitude, philosophy. (...)