Web 2.0 - Changing business paradigms

Web 2.0 has brought democratization of the internet; users have not only become participative but also demanding. This has forced websites to come up with innovative ideas regularly to attract traffic towards them, like online games, user customization, free storage space, free blog space, and many more. It has also pushed website owners to come up with new business models to generate revenue, as demanding users want more and more services for free and competitors are more than willing to accede to their demand. Even in this competitive environment many sites have created niche for themselves by setting new paradigms for online business, in a series of articles by this heading we would be looking at some of these websites dedicated to such business.

In this article we will look at a site called patientslikeme.com, which has been rated as one of the best business ideas of the year 2010. The look and feel of the site is that of a typical social networking site and the background colours give a feeling of a hospital.

We start by making a profile on the site, after filling in the details, one need to mention the disease he/she is suffering from out of the listed diseases (only life changing ones). Once a profile is made he/she gets a list of patients with a similar kind of disease (reminds me of friends list in Facebook). There are tabs pointing to discussion forums, symptoms, treatments, research and user profile. One can also upload once medical charts.

Symptoms, treatments and research gives access to bulk of literature pertaining to the condition of the user. The discussion forum is full of topics that will interest the particular patient. There is also a feature of how are you feeling now, which is typically current status equivalent of social networking sites. The “about us” section of the site inform us that the site plans to make its revenue by providing data to clinical research firms and that data would be given only after prior consent of the user.

The idea of the site seems to be a case of incremental innovation (Kotler’s chapter on innovation). Though it has got good response in America and Canada, but in my opinion long term success of the site would depend upon services it can provide to its users and ways it can generate revenues for its stakeholders.

The service it can provide to its users is consultation, but no solicitation policy in its discussion forums, which is to prevent its users from misleading advice, is limiting its ability to provide such kind service.

Also the revenue model of the site depends on generating data for clinical research. But the data that could be generated from this would be limited to the number of patients suffering from a particular disease from a particular location, then the number of patients prescribing for particular drug or treatment. For this information there would be few takers in market.

I wish the site comes up with innovative solutions to tackle these issues, I have sent set of questions to query section of this site pertaining to this and will update them as soon I get the response.