11. Examining the Wide Range of Business Models Currently in Use in Online Businesses: How to Understand a New Business Using Existing Frameworks

The net has facilitated the digital transformation of everything. Not surprisingly, since most human needs have not changed dramatically over the past twenty-five years, most of the activities transformed by the net have been the activities that humans have pursued since the beginning of time. We still eat, protect our families, seek shelter, make purchases, travel, read, and need entertainment. Our desire for these activities has not changed much in the few short years since the development of information technology. To a large extent, we use the net to facilitate the same things we always did. The digital transformation of everything has not resulted in the digital elimination or even the digital replacement of everything. Still, there are entirely new online businesses with entirely new online products and services. The net does allow us to do things we couldn’t do previously, rather than simply making it easier for us to do what we always did before. This chapter discusses Digitally Transformed Business Models and Fully Digital Business Models. It introduces eleven proven online business models, from the traditional (selling real stuff), through the virtual (selling virtual experiences, from games to higher education), and ends with those that monetize private information.