Assignment 2A

Search – Dogpile.com

Dogpile is a search engine that amalgamates search results from all major search engines. Their main source of revenue comes from advertisements. On the main search page, they have an advertisement for one of their own products/extensions.

Once you search for something, the search page contains a banner of scrollable shopping ads followed by sponsored results.

Not only are they running advertisements, but almost the entire half of the search results page are ads. This increases the chance that someone will click on them either on purpose or by accident.

Transaction – Tangerine

The way Tangerine makes money is a little different than dogpile using ad revenue to make a profit. Tangerine is a online banking service that makes its money by earning interest on funds that are deposited by customers into their accounts. They also earn money on interest charged on other services they offer such as credit cards, mortgages, and lines of credit.

Other ways they can make money include NSF fees as well as overdraft charges.

They are a subsidiary of Scotiabank and offer no brick-and-mortar locations, so they can cut down on their overhead costs and offer free or low fee accounts to their customers. This can be incredibly enticing to those with lower income or who don’t like to spend a lot of money on banking.

Informational – Minimalist Baker

Minimalist Baker is a blog-style website where you can find recipes, information on cooking techniques, and their shop. They pride themselves on having recipes that require very little time or effort to prepare and the majority of them are plant-based and gluten-free.

Their main way of making money would be ad revenue. The home page of the website is relatively ad free but once you start venturing into the recipes, the page is filled with video, banner, and other digital advertisements.

They also have two different shops. One of them is filled with their recomended products with affiliate links, mainly through Amazon. The other is where they sell their own made flour and cake mixes along with their cookbooks.

Entertainment – Neopets

Neopets in an online game and community website. You can create an account and own Neopets, various fantasy creatures you can use to explore the digital world of Neopia. They generate revenue in a multitude of ways.

They have a shop right on their main page where you can buy real-life merchandise including plushies and clothing.

They also have different advertisements including ones of their own content within the websites for things like neocash as well as ones for other websites and products not related to Neopets. They heavily promote their sponsors and their sponsors products throughout the site using advertisements.

Within the game they sell NeoCash to players for them to use in their gameplay to purchase items for their Neopets.

in 2021, Neopets also started selling pictures sold as NFT’s or Non-Fungible Tokens which are unique digital assets that cannot be duplicated for users to own and use in their new project Neopets Meta.

Community – Discord

Discord is an online community platform where you can communicate by text, video chat, and more in different groups known as servers. It competes with larger platforms like Facebook. Discord has an interesting revenue stream because they have a strict no ad rule. They do not display any advertisements or get any revenue from advertisements on their platform.

Discord, and many other platforms, uses a freemium model where you can pay to upgrade your membership to get premium assets not available in the free or lower tier subscriptions.

They have teamed up with larger companies like Spotify &Tencent to host events in different communities like music and gaming.

They also had their own game store where you could purchase games only available on Discord. This didn’t do very well and shortly after launching it was discontinued in favor of allowing game developers to sell their own games on their servers with Discord taking a cut of sales.

They also allow group makers to charge subscription fees to access their servers with Discord taking some of that profit as well.

Discord also offers server boosting which allows a group maker to boost their community with different things like added emojis, better audio and video quality, larger uploads allowed, different backgrounds, custome urls, and more.

SaaS – Grammarly

Grammarly is an extention that you can download for your browser that helps with your grammar, punctuation, and overwall writing prowess.

Grammarly has a subscription service where you can purchase a membership thats either free, premium, or for business. There are different ways to pay for some of these including monthly, bi-annually, and annually with annually being the overall cheapest option.

Grammarly is rather unique in that this is the only reported way they make money and the company has published statements confirming so. Lots of companies use multiple revenue avenues so it can be rather uncommmon to only use one.