Summary: Webonomics

Review and Analysis of Schwartz' Book

BusinessNews Publishing

• Publisher: Must Read Summaries
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9782511017005
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: E-Commerce
• Index: Business

The must-read summary of Evan Schwartz's book: `Webonomics: Nine Essential Principles for Growing Your Business on the World Wide Web`.

This complete summary of the ideas from Evan Schwartz's book `Webonomics` presents a strategy for delivering business principles and strategies for successful internet-based commerce. In his book, the author explains the nine principles of Webonomics which have been derived from the study of successful internet business models and explain why some succeed while others don't. This summary provides readers with a road map for achieving and sustaining commercial success on the internet.

Added-value of this summary:
• Save time
• Understand key concepts
• Expand your business knowledge

To learn more, read `Webonomics` and discover the key to achieving success in the crowded internet marketplace.

Summary of Webonomics (Evan Schwartz)

Principle #1
The quantity of people visiting your Web site is less important than the quality of their experience

Main Idea

The Web is not a mass broadcast medium. It’s a vast niche medium which allows personalization and interactivity. Therefore, to be successful, a Web site should focus not on the number of visitors but on the quality of the visit each individual enjoys.

Supporting Ideas

Traditional economics is based on the concept of scarcity – that consumer demands will always exceed supply, thereby driving prices upwards. On the Web, however, the supply of information available greatly exceeds demand. The only commodity in limited supply is the attention of busy people who have numerous other web sites to visit.

Therefore, the key is not solely to capture but also to sustain the attention of people visiting your Web site. The only way to do this is by providing visitors with a high-quality experience every time they visit.

To deliver consistent high-quality visits:

• Don’t simply provide information, but an opportunity for visitors to interact with other visitors – creating an online community of people with a common interest. The information can provide a context, but the sense of community will drive people to visit again and again to stay up-to-date on the latest developments.
• Find ways to let people personalize their online experience with you. The Internet is used by a large number of people, but it’s not a broadcast media or a mass media. It’s more of a niche or personal medium in which each person’s experience can differ from everyone else’s. The best way to allow that personal element to fully develop is to take advantage of the interactive nature of the Internet, and let people select their own experiences. That way, people can create added value from their own perspectives by using your product in a way that suits their own personal requirements and preferences.
• Provide optional value-added services to your Web site visitors. Perhaps part of your Web site can provide free information with visitors having the option of subscribing for other value-added services if interested. There’s a balance to be hit here – your free section should be sufficiently compelling to attract numerous visitors, a proportion of which will be provided with sufficient incentive to pay for access to additional parts of the site, or additional products or services.
• The Web lends itself exceptionally well to niche based marketing approaches. Find a unique niche nobody else is targeting, deliver a high quality experience tailored for people within that niche (which utilizes the interactive nature of the Internet effectively) and you create an extremely loyal core group of individuals.
• One of the key challenges of building a successful Web based business lies in deciding what to charge for and what to provide for free. There are a number of successful business models developed, some of which are based on the portal approach (build a Web site millions of people visit regularly and sell advertising). Other models have a two tiered structure, in which free information is available as a draw card for large numbers of visitors, and other value-added products which can be personalized are then available on a subscription basis. (The advantage of having paid subscribers is that people inherently feel information they have paid for is more valuable than something they received for free).
• The most successful business sites on the Web (in terms of generating revenue) are those that offer the greatest degree of personalization.
• Web based information companies will not replace or supersede paper based publications. Historically, new media has never completely replaced older media. Rather, the Internet will require print publications to reformat their content, offering more of a participatory experience that creates synergies between the Web site visitor and the company.
• To succeed, a Web site effectively has to be able to strike an individual bargain with each visitor – to provide a high quality experience, tailored to the specific interests of the visitor.

Key Thoughts

“The Web has low barriers to entries, but huge barriers to profits.”

– Walter Forbes, Chairman, Cedant Corp.

“The basic costs for a physical retailer – bricks, mortar, real estate, people, taxes, healthcare – a...

Table of contents

• Title page
• Book Presentation
• Summary of Webonomics (Evan Schwartz)
• About the Summary Publisher
• Copyright