Online revenue models (also known as online business models) describe different techniques for generation of income from an Internet business. The 8 revenue online models described in this post are looking specifically at the revenue options for online publishing businesses. 

Online publisher revenue models for online business

For a publisher or other media site owner, I would identify eight types of revenue model which are possible online. Let me know of any I'm missing :) Of course, transactional sites have the option of these also in addition to sales - online, everyone is a media owner.
To model different Internet site revenue models I also have an online revenue model spreadsheet.
This spreadsheet is for media site owners to estimate ad or affiliate marketing revenue from a site or section of site. It allows parameters such as % inventory, number of ad units, CPM and CPC to be set. Total revenue for each ad unit or container and corresponding Earnings per 100 clicks (EPC) or Earnings per thousand page views (eCPM) are calculated automatically.

OK, these are my eight alternative digital revenue models:

1. Revenue from subscription access to content

A range of documents can be accessed for a period of a month or typically a year. For example, I subscribe to FT.com for access to the digital technology section for around €80 per year.

2. Revenue from Pay Per View access to documents

Here payment occurs for single access to a document, video or music clip which can be downloaded. It may or may not be protected with a password or Digital Rights Management.

For example, I pay to access detailed best practice guides on Internet marketing from Marketing Sherpa.

Digital rights management (DRM) The use of different technologies to protect the distribution of digital services or content such as software, music, movies, or other digital data.

3. Revenue from CPM display advertising on site (e.g. banners ads and skyscrapers).

CPM stands for ‘cost per thousand’ where M denotes ‘Mille’. The site owner such as FT.com charges advertisers a rate card price (for example $50 CPM) according to the number of its ads shown to site visitors. Ads may be served by the site owners own ad server or more commonly through a third-party ad network service such as Google AdSense as is the case with my site.

4. Revenue from CPC advertising on site (pay per click text ads)

CPC stands for ‘Cost Per Click’. Advertisers are charged not simply for the number of times their ads are displayed, but according to the number of times they are clicked. These are typically text ads similar to sponsored links within a search engine but delivered over a network of third-party sitesby on a search engine such as "Google:http://www.google.com or on a network such as Google Adsense, Yahoo Content Match, Microsoft Content Ads or MIVA.

Typical costs per click can be surprisingly high, i.e. they are in the range €0.10 to €4, but sometimes up to €20 for some categories such as ‘life insurance’ which have a high value to the advertiser. The revenue for search engines or publishers from these sources can also be significant. For financial year 2005, Google reported its search revenues as follows: Google Sites Revenues - Google-owned sites generated revenues of $1.098 billion, or 57% of total revenues. Google Network Revenues - Google's partner sites generated revenues, through AdSense programs totaling $799 million, or 42% of total revenues.

For me, the search content networks are one of the biggest secrets in online marketing with search engines such as Google generating over a third of their revenue from the network, but some advertisers not realising their ads are being displayed beyond search engines and so not served for this purpose.

Google is the innovator and offers options for different formats of ad units including text ads, display ads, streamed videos and now even cost per action as part of its pay per action scheme.