Knowledge Base 5: Business model
The system described in the posts Knowledge Base 2: The structure and the method of building, Knowledge Base 3: Shopping advisor and other uses of knowledge base about products, and Knowledge Base 4: General applications can have the following sources of revenue:
simple ads;
fees for placing a product on a search results list;
fees for redirecting to websites of stores;
percentage of a product sale/rent price.
Why should users add information to the system?
If a user adds information that will be used to generate some revenue, we will share a part of this revenue with him. Usefulness (and credibility) of the information will be taken into account. An example of useful information are all pieces of information displayed on a product overview page on which a user clicks the Buy button.
Adding information in the initial phase of knowledge base development can be particularly profitable since users can choose the most popular information that will bring the largest income in the future. This can be compared to buying Bitcoins in the initial phase.
Will you have a post about conflict handling, curation/verification of assertions, and handling of adversarial motives for contributing?
I think it’s the critical topic to solve for crowd-sourced knowledge, and it ties nicely into business model because your revenue method is one of the primary ways that bias and misaligned focus can creep in.
I will write what I think about this topic. I thought mentioning the solutions in the 2nd post is enough, but maybe describing and discussing them more is a good idea.