Marvel Story

Read a book called Unstoppable gave me this story:
Marvel Comics used to sell comic books. That was their business. They created comics, they sold them in the form of books.
Then, one day, they realize that the real asset isn’t the publishing business. Which is what they had directly built.
What they had indirectly built is characters that had stories. And those were assets.
They were able to monetize those assets by licensing those characters into movies.
First model = direct source of revenue from activity they did themselves.
2nd model = indirect source of revenue by licensing characters so others could decide how / what to do.
This example just illustrates for me the many new ways we can think about our current businesses. It’s what is going on with “free” in the business models today. Google certainly makes money doing advertising. Catster makes it through sponsorship. Linked In makes it through Job search. ClusterMaps does it by storing your data. SugarCRM does it by selling appliances, MySQL does it through support and maintenance. My point is hopefully clear. But if it’s not, I’ve got another 50 examples so email me.
Many companies are now figuring how to monetize things beside the “thing” they make. In some cases the free model is simply a new way of monetizing. In some cases, the form of monetizing is a 2nd source of revenue for doing the same thing.
Something to think about: what’s your Marvel Story? What can you do to monetize your assets you already have.