Week 5 - Questions

Business Models

Brokerage Model
The "market makers". Brokers bring together buyers and sellers, and can take part in the negotiation and sales process on behalf of either or both parties. They generate revenue by charging a commission on all sales attributed to them. The best known example would be eBay

Advertising Model
An advertising business generates revenue by - you guessed it - advertising! This covers a wide variety of different sub-sects (as does brokerage) but the main types would be paid placement advertising where a company (generally a search engine) with high traffic will charge companies a fee to get favourable positions in search results or prominence in sidebar advertisements. The obvious choice for an example here is

Infomediarie Model
A business that sells information to gain revenue. Call lists, purchasing habits, etc are all compiled into large chunks of data which are then sold off to other companies, usually to aid them in product development or consumer behaviour studies. Infomediaries also run sites of their own where people can subscribe to register opinions. These opinions are then collated into reports and sold off to other companies with a vested interest in the opinions. http://www.google.com/ would most likely fall under this category.

Merchant Model
Wholesalers and retailers of good and services. Basically an electronic version of a bricks and mortar shop. http://www.woolworths.com/

Manufacturer (Direct) Model
Allows a manufacturer to directly sell their goods and improve efficiency and profitability by cutting out the intermediary (usually a wholesaler) and taking some of the profit margin that a wholesaler would otherwise get for themselves.

Affiliate Model
Provides a purchase point click through service for affiliated merchant sites. This is growing in popularity, as it is relatively low cost. It is a pay-for-performance structure, so if the affiliate does not generate increased revenue, the merchant incurs no costs.

Subscription Model
Generates income by charging users (subscribers) a periodic fee to stay registered with the site and gain the benefits obtained for being a subscriber (e.g downloading articles, music or movies). These fees are generally charged at a flat rate, so regardless of if you are downloading 300GB or 300Mb, the charge remains the same.

Utility Model
Also known as the "on-demand" model. It is the reverse idea of a subscription model, this model charges users for what they actually use ("metering") rather than charging a flat rate for subscription. iTunes is probably a good example of a metered service, as you pay individually for what you choose to download.


References

http://digitalenterprise.org/models/models.html#Brokerage

Week 4 - Questions

Web Analytics



1. Looking at the site usage, what do the terms visits, page views, and pages/visit mean? What does the bounce rate mean and does it vary much from day to day?


Bounce Rate - the rate at which people who access the site leave before navigating to another page on the site. It doesn't seem to be particularly stable at all, the variance can change quite significantly from day to day


Visits - the amount of people who click into the site


Page Views - the amount of pages on the site, and how often they are visited


Pages/Visit - the amount of pages that people access while on the site



2. What are the three sources of traffic, and where has most of the traffic come from?

The three sources of traffic are direct traffic, search engines & referring sites.

The biggest source of traffic in this instance was direct traffic.

3. What was the most popular web browser used to access this site?

The most popular browser used to access the site was Internet Explorer. As a metric, this is important because it allows for the administrator of the site to optimize the site in favour of IE users, being that they are the most common visitors.

4. How many countries did visitors to Foliospaces come from and what were the top four countries?

This Foliospaces blog had visitors from approximately 130 countries, with the top four countries for amounts of visits being

1. Australia



2. US



3. UK



4. Canada

References

www.google.com/analytics/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_analytics

Week 3 - Questions

1. Explain why a customer-centric website design is so important, yet so difficult to achieve?




The difficulty in creating a customer-centric website lies within the customers using the website. Customers will all look at a website and evaluate it differently, based on things such as ease of use, level of technological aptitude needed to navigate the page, use of graphics and video, use of fonts, and countless other things that are seemingly small, but can have an impact on the customer. Therefore while I might look at a website and consider it to be "customer-centric", my grandfather may look at it and have an entirely different view, based on his personal outlook as a consumer.




Another important point to note is that where websites may have once been used only to convey information or deals to a customer, we are now seeing a growing numbers of entities that have transactional capabilities on their website - that is to say, customers are now able to purchase direct from the website, rather than using it as a tool to decide or do research on a product. This change in how websites are used has led to it being far more important to focus on the customer, rather than the product.





2. Define the term "presence"

Well, its definitely not the presents above (sorry for the bad humour, but this used to be a pet hate of mine, people using presents and meaning presence or vice versa)

Presence (in an online sense) basically means how easy it is to find yourself or your company online, it measures how pervasive you are as an online entity. Nowadays, with the growing fad of people using social networking for marketing, it is a lot easier to make your entities presence grow on the internet. Its just a matter of getting a Twitter, a Facebook, a Picasa, a blog... The more you can push your entity online, the greater your presence will be.

That being said, having too great a presence online can be detrimental to your business. Whilst having multiple accounts on different sites can help you establish presence, if you flood the Net with it, you risk alienating consumers, or them becoming apathetic towards your business. It is a fine balance between creating an effective presence without overdoing it.

3. What can Real Estate agents best accomplish through

a) Their Websites

Having a digital presence online would be of great benefit to real estate agents, as it allows people to preliminarily view a house that they may not have been able to otherwise, thus opening the market up to a previously un-engageable consumer. It really widens the market base, and takes a lot of the burden and time management hassles out of their jobs.

b) Mass Media advertising

Similar to the above point, but also captures that portion of the market who may not use the internet, or if they do, would not use if for the purpose of looking at houses. Also catches "spontaneous" buyers who may not be particularly looking for property, but have the wherewithal to purchase a property on the fly.

c) Personal Contact

The personal contact facet would be the closing of the sale, and establishing of rapport with the potential customer. The website and/or mass media advertising are really what generates interest and contributes largely to the actual sale of the house, so in this way the sale is almost process-driven, and without the first two methods, personal contact would be pretty much negligible.

References

"Digital Design" Lecture by Michael Rappa (transcript)

http://digitalenterprise.org/transcripts/design_tr.html