Retailers in the aggregator category aggregate merchandise or services from many different companies and make them available for sale in an online supermarket type of format. The retailers we recently mentioned within the content creator category are merchants selling their own brands, and their brands only. Retailers that belong to the content aggregator category offer merchandise within a mall context, in which multiple brands are featured in their own virtual locations, or grouped by function, regardless of brand. Revenues are mostly derived from sales commissions. For example, although we would consider hpshopping.com a content creator in the consumer electronics space, the company’s products are also available from online content aggregators such as the online retailer buy.com. Last, we consider community builders as a unique group within the content aggregator category. Community builders foster the creation of network communities around specific topics of end-user interest, such as hobbies, geographical location, professional interest, or self-help issues.

For content aggregators, the name of the game is critical mass. Unless we are talking about aggregators that are representing offline brands and that are frequently backed by their deep-pocketed parents, wireless portal operators must hustle to establish brand recognition. Their foremost concern is to quickly attract and retain a large user base in an effort to attain profitability from a revenue model that is built upon advertising fees of referral/sales commissions. Yet, creating “sticky” portals is no small feat; entry barriers are low, and the competition—as the short history of the Internet has shown—is fierce. Those players who will be successful in the wireless portal game are the ones who establish alliances with the major content providers (upstream sourcing) and carriers and wireless service providers (downstream distribution) to tap into fresh content from the former, and an already existing customer base from the latter.

Taken From : Enterprise Guide to Gaining Business Value from Mobile Technologies

Filed under: Generate Money

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