9thX.com kicks off our Network Businesses series. Its technology allows digital content creators and distributors to create their own shops for buying and reselling that content. 9thX.com makes its money by taking a 5% cut each time digital content is sold through its system.
9thX.com kicks off our Network Businesses series. For our purposes, Network Businesses are those that exploit unique features of the Internet in their business model. Often these businesses have a unique information asset that they are able to charge for. Further, they then exploit the network to make that asset even more valuable. This model lies at the heart of major upheaval in many industries.
As explained by John Bonaccorso, 9thX.com's CEO, the 9thX.com allows people to buy and sell digital media. They are an "end-to-end" solution that allows content producers and distributors to sell their content and receive royalty payments each time the content is resold. Some highlights from this conversation:
- 9thX.com allows content producers to be paid directly for their work. Most niche content producers have too small a market for an advertising revenue model to work.
- 9thX.com spends no money on marketing. All marketing is done by word of mouth through the web site and distributors.
- 9thX.com makes its money by controlling the digital rights management system that makes royalty-based payments possible. Each time an asset is purchased or resold, 9thX.com gets 5%.
- 9thX.com's computing infrastructure is supplied by Amazon's EC2 and S3 services.