Overview of business models for Web 2.0 communities

A new type of communities is gaining momentum on the web and is reshaping online communication and collaboration patterns and the way how information is consumed and produced. Examples of such communities are Wikipedia, MySpace, OpenBC, YouTube, Folksonomies, numerous Weblogs and others. In literature different terms can be found to denote the emerging and growing new phenomenon: social software or peer production.

In the year 2005, Tim O'Reilly popularized the term Web 2.0 . While the first two terms can be applied also to earlier, already established forms of online communities, the term Web 2.0 is mostly applied to emphasize the differences of emerging communities compared to earlier forms of online communities, encompassing various perspectives - technology, attitude, philosophy.

While, recently the mass media have picked up broadly the term Web 2.0 and the related phenomenon of emerging online communities, there has been less attention in the scientific community. First papers are available that try to define the phenomenon and to relate it to existing developments. Other papers categorize Web 2.0 communities and provide a first detailed description of the various kind of communities. There are also first papers that focus on a certain type of Web 2.0 communities as for example: social networking communities, Online Encyclopedias, Folksonomies. The most widely researched phenomenon are Web-blogs .