Datasheet

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Chapter 1 ✦ Introducing Curl
Things are never so neatly defined in practice, of course. A “free” site is essentially
a subscription site with a fee of zero or with a marketing area designed to sell sub-
scriptions or transactions; and an advertising site is essentially a transaction-fee
site, except that the transactions that yield money are advertising impressions to
the user.
Sites can be further categorized by whether they allow public access or private
access. These two dimensions segment Web applications into four quadrants
shown in Table 1-1. The sections below discuss how each relates to Curl.
Table 1-1
Business Models
Transaction Revenue Subscription Revenue
Public Users Amazon, eBay, Dell, etc. Wall Street Journal, Yahoo!*, etc.
Private Users Fidelity, E*Trade, etc. Communispace, Paychex, Intranets*, etc.
*Note that “free” sites, such as Yahoo!, or a corporate intranet, can be thought of as subscription sites with a fee
of zero. Free corporate sites are marketing areas designed to sell subscriptions or transactions (offline or online).
Public transaction sites
Public transaction sites include such Web poster children as Amazon, eBay, and
Dell. These sites are open to any Web user and make money when a user completes
a transaction. From a technical and operational viewpoint, this category stands to
gain the most from a Curl solution. Curl could save these high-traffic sites tremen-
dous amounts of money in reduced server and bandwidth costs.
Unfortunately, downloading the Surge plug-in presents the biggest challenge to
public transaction sites. With so many new users each day, they simply can’t insure
that the majority of users will have Surge installed on their computers.
Short term, these sites may want to start a small Curl project and create a mem-
bers-only segment of their site with a premium interface. Repeat users would be
enticed to download Surge to gain access to more sophisticated features. In effect,
this converts a segment of these sites to private transaction sites for frequent
users. Every user they entice to use the Curl application saves them money. Equally
important, as Surge becomes more prevalent, they will already have a Curl applica-
tion waiting. They can maintain their market leadership while making a smooth
transition.
Public subscription sites
Public subscription sites include paid sites, such as the Wall Street Journal online,
and sites such as Yahoo! (Think of it as a free subscription.) Again, technically and
operationally these sites would benefit tremendously from Curl.
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