Many people ask us, "but if you give away your research how do you make money?" Wikibon's strategy is to give away high value content and social media services for free and to generate revenue by providing value added services to private clients. Our clients have told us that subscription-based research services have become like a 'library card' where you pay a fee and if information is on the shelf, you can access it, otherwise you need to pay up. We've decided to lower the barriers of entry to access high quality research and charge for what clients really want, value for a fair price.
Our value added services include:
Open Access Services
Open Access is a base level service that helps connect technology suppliers to the Wikibon community. Through Open Access, we invite technology vendors and their clients to actively participate in the Wikibon experience and interact with other members. From these activities, we publish research notes that are relevant to the community. Some things we do and don't:
- We don't ever use Wikibon members for lead generation activities.
- We don't take money to write vendor white papers.
- We do write about topics that interest our community. Our clients can suggest topics but there's no implied or explicit guarantee we'll write about such topics.
- Anyone can edit our work which we believe keeps the content objective and authentic.
In addition to these services, our community subject matter experts are frequently asked to provide support for questions about strategy, technology, adoption, pricing, markets, negotiation strategies and TCO.
While we don't take vendor money for writing white papers we are requested from time-to-time to provide PDF re-prints of research that we publish or access to podcasts we create from our Peer Incite Research Meetings. The Open Access Services allow clients to obtain these reprints free of charge.
Each Open Access client is assigned a team that looks after their needs and provides ideas and tips as to how to get the most out of the Wikibon experience. We make this service available for an annual fee to Open Access clients under the proviso that anything we create on Wikibon must be produced for our user audience and not something that is contracted by our vendor clients.
Wikibon plans to publish and keep up to date a list of Open Access clients on our Web site for transparency purposes.
Conserve IT is a service to assist technology suppliers in qualifying their products as energy efficient with utility companies such as Pacific Gas & Electric Company (PG&E). With Conserve IT Wikibon also helps customers access incentive rebates from a variety of utilities companies across North America. Read more about Conserve IT.
Consulting Activities
Wikibon provides strategic consulting to both buy -side and sell-side organizations. These are statement of work based projects that are typically conducted on a fixed fee basis.