The purpose of this exercise is to increase your familiarity with some successful Web sites, to critique them from the viewpoint of the "Business Models for Electronic Commerce" notes, and to produce three enlightening profiles to share with your classmates. The official time budget is three hours in total, although you would profit commensurately by spending more time in the way suggested. Due Class 7.

Selecting Sites

You need to select three successful sites for which to write profiles. One is completely at your discretion. The other two are at your discretion also but, to reduce the amount of profile duplication in the class as a whole, I request that the other two sites have names beginning with the same letter as your last name or with one of the five letters following that. For this purpose, the end of the alphabet wraps around to the beginning. For example, someone whose last name begins with "W" can choose to profile two sites with names that begin with W, X, Y, Z, A, or B. Of course, there should be no duplicates with sites that you profiled in Homework 1. Nor should you profile any of the sites already profiled in "The Emerging Digital Economy" report.

Please select the most successful sites you can find that support electronic commerce in some way. What is a "successful" site? Possible definitions include:

1. The site is doing provably well relative to other sites by one or another of the business models in the "Business Models for Electronic Commerce" notes. E.g.:
• The total sales revenue (or profit, if such information is available) is relatively high among sites that mainly aim to sell things.
• The total ad revenue is relatively high among sites that rely heavily on advertising revenues.
• The total access revenue is relatively high among sites that charge pay-per-view or pay-per-period fees.
• The total transaction volume is relatively high among sites that charge fees or commissions on transactions that they facilitate.
• The total membership is relatively high among sites that seek to build a large community of members.
2. Total traffic is relatively high among all sites that compete with it (using a very broad definition of "competition").
3. The site has achieved favorable notice by a credible person or organization.

Category 1 and 2 sites often can be identified by reports and releases published by some of the sites cited in Demo 1, which compile hard data; see the link on the course home page. See especially Media Metrix and RelevantKnowledge. Another site of this type is WebSideStory at http://www.hitbox.com/wc/world.html, but beware: it ranks sites within category by activity level, but only those sites that choose to be included. Still another is 100hot at http://www.100hot.com, which claims to use log data primarily from proxy servers representing "the surfing patterns of over 100,000 surfers world-wide," but doesn’t disclose their method. Do not neglect the press releases of the sites themselves, which often brag about various measures of their success.

Category 3 sites can be identified from such subjective rankings and ratings as:

• IPPA Award for Design Excellence, at http://www.ippa.org/20_101.html (take the "Previous DX Award Winners" link), gives an in-depth discussion of the design merits of the site to which they give their award each week. IPPA stands for Internet Professional Publishers Association.

• Lycos TOP 5%, at http://point.lycos.com/categories/, lists a dozen or two leading sites in each of 18 categories.
• PC Magazine’s favorites, at the URLs given in the Syllabus’ Kerievsky reference item in the Business-to-Consumer E-Commerce module, is a good source.

• Yahoo! Internet Life Reviews, at http://www.zdnet.com/yil/filters/revjump.html, gives numerous site reviews (0-4 stars plus commentary) in many categories including shopping (http://www.zdnet.com/yil/filters/index/toc_shop.html).

• There are numerous sites run by individuals or tiny companies in hopes (usually) of attracting advertising. One of these is Web 100 at http://www.web100.com, which maintains a list of the 100 top-rated sites based on user ratings. It is, of course, subject to ballot-stuffing, but the list contains many good sites. There is a capsule review of each site in the top 100. Another of these is Platinum 100 from Firestorm Productions at http://www.firestorm.com/plat98.html. It has explicit selection criteria (see the points.html page), many judges from around the world, and a thumbnail description of each winning site.

Your Profiles

Design your profiles to be informative to your classmates, and even to a broader audience (later we’ll discuss the possibility of publishing them for public consumption). Write them as a series of separate pieces rather than interleaving them.

Near the beginning of each, please state explicitly how you discovered it and the criterion by which you selected it. The first point provides an opportunity to supplement the suggestions given above for finding successful sites.

The main part of each profile should be a description and analysis of the site using the viewpoint of the "Business Models for Electronic Commerce" notes. Try to understand the site by resolving it into its component pure business models, and grapple if you can with some of the questions that arise naturally as a result, such as:

• How well does the site succeed at each component business model?
• Are these the "right" component business models, in the right mix, for such a site (consider sins of omission as well as of commission)?
• How could the site be improved in terms of each component business model?

Publishing Your Profiles (important)

Write the entire homework assignment as a single Web page named hw6.htm (subordinate Web pages are permissible but not necessary) and publish it per the instructions you received previously: see item 8 of your Week 2 Assignment sheet. Thus the filename will be http://internal.anderson.ucla.edu/student/ YourFirstName.YourLastName/hw6.htm.

So that an external link can point to one or another of your profiles, insert a name link (or Target, in Composer’s lingo) at the beginning of each with the name "1" or "2" or "3". Thus the HTML for the first such link will be <A NAME="1"></A>, and this will be placed just before your first profile. Please observe this convention exactly, or external links will not work.