There are many ways that our social networking application could be used to generate revenue. Advertising is an obvious revenue stream, although it is important that whatever advertising is added to our application (even for the purposes of a ‘freemium’ esque model) is relevant to the app itself. Relevant advertising could include travel and accommodation, and information about local stores and points of interest in the area the event is taking place.

Guidance
Some people would be prepared to pay for better advice, particularly if they are attending an event abroad e.g Italy. Our app could provide our users with advice about Italian hotels, Guide offices, prices for visiting points of interest such as the Vatican and much much more [1]. Moreover, our app could also detail people with the weather forecast information for the event, in addition to useful transportation information and pricing.

Targeted Advertising
Advertising could also be targeted based on the type of event a user is going to. For example if they are going to a meal with friends, and they have set their start location as their home address, perhaps our application could provide offers on restaurants in their area [2]. The beauty of this type of targeted advertising is that it wouldn’t revolve around storing and repurposing the users information, it would purely be based on the current event that is being organised. This could work for all the varieties of events that our application offers (e.g business and pleasure).

Promotion Advertising
In addition to getting people to pay for general advertising on our application (which would be distributed to the relevant audiences) specific travel companies could also pay to be promoted within our application. For instance specific taxi companies could pay to have their taxi number promoted for all people in that area wanting to travel by taxi.

Booking Referrals/Extras
Companies might also pay for booking referrals, for instance if a taxi was booked through our app.
In the same vein as “in game purchases” our application could offer extras such as upgrades to first class travel where we would receive a certain payment for facilitating this purchase.

No Advertising App
There are some people who won’t want advertising in their app however relevant it might be. For those people we could offer a “pay for” app that doesn’t have advertising. That way we could collect purchase revenue for each person who wanted that kind of app.

Promotion
An essential step towards commercialising our application is to promote it. This could also be done via the use of social networks, for instance it could be advertised on Facebook or a blog could be produced illustrating how it works with a video [3]. In addition it is important to advertise this to people who don’t use social networks as well, so that they can understand how they may use the application without having to sign up for it. This could be done through TV or magazine advertising.

[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/larryolmsted/2012/01/20/why-you-need-a-travel-agent-part-1/
[2] http://www.ican.org.uk/da/Support-us/Fundraising%20Events/Arrange%20your%20own%20event.aspx
[3] http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/229305