In the early years of the internet, conventional wisdom dictated that the best way to make money on the web was to charge people to use the site. With the rise of Facebook, Google, and countless other free websites, the focus has shifted on providing free content to users in order to gain a following. Once enough people begin to visit the site regularly, money can be made by giving companies space to advertise on the site.

I recently made a purchase on Craigslist and began to wonder how the site made money at all. Craigslist allows people to post and view classified ads for free and there are no advertisements on the site. The site has remained very simple over the years and has somehow made itself an internet giant with seemingly no way to make money off of the business model. I decided to dig a little deeper and found that while the large majority of their classified ad postings are free, the job category section does in fact charge money. Somehow this small section of the site is able to generate enough money to fund the rest of the operation and make Craigslist a profitable venture. It is amazing that this seemingly insignificant amount of posts can generate so much income. It makes one wonder how rich Craigslist would be if they charged for other categories in addition to the jobs section or if it allowed outside advertises space to solicit its users.

Woot is one of those revolutionary internet ideas that took hold and now has a culture and following of its own. This company has made its mark by having a deal-a-day and selling only that one product for the entirety of the day until it is sold out. Even more interesting is that it can receive 7 million requests for a “Bag of Crap” like it did on April Fools Day 2011.

What really perplexes me is how people are willing to buy a product simply because it is available. Woot sells a variety of items ranging for t-shirts to digital cameras. For some reason, people think that because a product is featured on the site, it is inherently a great deal. Out of curiosity I have begun researching what the products on Woot typically are sold for elsewhere and if there is any better product on the market for that price. What I have found is that many times there is a slight discount on the product but it is rare for it to be the best option available on the market. Users would typically be better served shopping around for a digital camera than buying the one that is featured on the site.

My hypothesis of this impulse buying phenomenon was confirmed at a recent “Woot Off” earlier this month. I watched as one product after another flew off the site as it was sold out. One product that was featured during that day was “Tron: Legacy 12” Ultimate Action Figure Set.” I thought to myself that surely this would take a long time to sell out since Tron had a reputation as being a horrible movie and an action figure from the movie would be even more useless, especially when it cost the user $25 to buy and ship it. As of 8:45 when I logged on there were no units sold yet as it had just been posted. Then at 9:13 when I refreshed the page it was sold out. In less than a half hour, all of the Tron action figures were had been purchased.

We certainly live in a culture of impulse buying and Woot is capitalizing on this as well as any company on the market. People are purchasing goods off Woot because they get eager to buy something and because they want to see what product comes up next. This is a sad reflection on our culture and a pathetic use of the financial resources people have.

How would you like to make $100,000 and be recognized as a significant contributor to the mathematical community without having to do any work? The Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search, or GIMPS for short, allows common people to help achieve big things simply by downloading and running a free program in the background of their computer. GIMPS is a collaborative project that utilizes the computing power of all of the computers who have downloaded the program to search for the highest Mersenne Prime number. A mersenne prime is a positive integer that is one less than a power of two. This effort has accounted for finding 13 Mersenne primes the, largest of which is 243,112,609 – 1. The amount of computations that have been made since this project began would not have been fathomable if it was running on simply one computer since no single computer has enough computing power to do this alone. Its success has been due to GIMPS willingness to freely distribute the algorithm to other computers with the end goal of finding these Mersenne primes.  This is a great example of how crowdsourcing an effort can be way more successful than trying to work on a project internally in an organization. GIMPS which was founded in 1997 was the leader in large scale distributed research computing over the internet. I suspect that more companies and organizations will continue to follow this successful model.

This simple phrase is the slogan and business idea of a growing new site known as Zilok. Zilok resembles Craigslist in that users can search both by location and item which they want to acquire. The primary difference between the two sites is that Zilok is positioned only as a rental site and does not have the other categories that Craigslist offers to its users. Instead, Zilok spends its time making an easily navigable site which allows people to rent almost anything including: tools, electronics, dresses, instruments, and jewelry. Virtually any item that may be used only a few times where it could be cheaper to rent, is offered on this site. Since it allows people to search by region, it is an easy way for anyone to find an item they need for a short time at an affordable cost. While some may not need this service because they have friends or family close by who own many of these items, it is a great alternative for unique items or for people who do not have access to a large network of resources.

Check out Zilok for yourself!

Hope International is one of the most recognizable names in microfinance around the world. Hope International gives poor people loans to purchase useful goods that will hope them to start a business and become self-sufficient. One thing that makes this organization attractive is that they have over a 99% success rate for getting investor’s money back.

While this is good to get your money back, another great option is to actually purchase practical gifts for these people. This is a great mission opportunity where you can provide gift options ranging from a sales stand where goods can be sold to rabbits which will provide a sustainable food source. Instead of helping people by giving a one-time gift of food or money, like so many are prone to, a gift of this sort can give people permanent food, pride, and hope.