Introduction:

Internet represents at the same time a very easy and a very difficult marketplace. At first, internet seems to be a very attractive market for retailers: Very low fixed costs, big clientele, high economies of scale and cheap marketing. That, perhaps, is the reason why too many enterprises tried to use internet for new and similar services and why they faced themselves in a highly competitive environment. Pricing competition has flushed internet with offers for free, right now: Free software tools, free email- and SMS-services, free Information platforms and some illegal systems which everybody allows sharing also copyrighted files and programs, like: Movies, music, programs for free. Also, there is a real culture to offer services for free: I.e. the operating system “Linux” is programmed by worldwide individuals offering their programming skills for free!

Because of this cultural dilemma, the average internet client got used to pay for nothing, even though he already had a low price elasticity. In the end, the only successful charged internet service seem to be services with those the client can really earn money (e-bay, Internship switching, Diploma trading, Reports offered by i.e. Forrester Research) and also sex-pages should be mentioned.

It seems to be plausible, that, if you want to earn money with a service offered via internet you have to attract professional clients, who can use your service to earn money with. These are those who already use similar, classic and higher paid services or who did (what you want to offer online) by themselves. A bad economic environment (like it is right now) will help you attract these clients, because in these times, the clients more likely switch to lower priced offers (price elasticity of the demand is getting higher). Therefore, you will be able to attract also clients which originally had high willingness to pay for services, as long as you offer the same service. What I want to use in my business Idea is also the hope of the client to be able to earn money with my services, or, to just make the dream of getting model easier to achieve and affordable.

Understanding the business Idea

This work analyses the possibilities of making revenues for a concrete business idea, a customer platform which performs as an internet based casting service. It shall perform as a casting service for professional and non professional actors, mannequins and even musicians or bands. There can be considered a professional and a non-professional area in which the members can put in their Sedcard (set card, Zed cards) in order to apply for jobs. A Sedcard

represent a Card with which normally mannequins apply for a contract at the publicity agencies. It is an application card with a front cover photo, having some different (normally 4) photos in the rear. Besides, there are written the basic body values and preferences of the mannequin on it. Offering this online would make it easier for the agencies. They would save all this disliked paperwork and especially in casting processes for films, where exact faces are searched, it would become much easier to just do this online. Also for model agencies it could become easier to find new faces, because they are not dependent to their own database, but have range of world wide operating models. An online advantage for musicians, was the possibility to upload some self made music songs which also could be listened online in a casting process. The big advantage of this is the easiness. Normally it is very difficult f.e. for bar owners to find suitable musicians for their special nights. Therefore they have to use the expensive service of agencies, matching them suited musicians. With a online casting service like this, the bar owner could easily find a suited band by himself and perhaps book it online. If booking gets included, the platform would act as an agency and the market potential would be Germany wide the market of all agencies. Only in the mannequin sector I estimate the number of agencies in Germany to about 500. In general, there are about 5000 not specialized publicity agencies existing in yellow pages. They all are brokers, earning money with trading the mannequins and do not all have them under exclusive contract. There are a lot of models acting independently (Compare the list of URL’s to personnel homepages of models).

The business model in a technical Use Case diagram…

How to create “visibility”

As one marketing concept to create visibility, I considered a rating system like www.hotornot.com or www.binichsexy.de where people can put in their photos and get rated by internet users. Binichsexy.de had 300 million votes in about 3 years and got a well known page in a couple of months. The problem is the big data volume of 300 Gigabytes per month (approximately at 30K per picture) which is not affordable as a marketing tool. However, binichsexy.de had too many participants. I want only candidates to load up their photos or their music, who are really interested in becoming a professional and therefore build in a system which kicks out the poorly rated candidates quickly. Data volume therefore is becoming less and hopefully staying under 100 Gb/month. I estimate, a server connection for this data volume costs about 200EUR per month (1&1 Germany offers this). Therefore,