Ask HN: Revenue possibility from Chatbots

[mayank_zuppit]

Let me start this on very simple note which is - there is no defined way to make money out of anything new (Chatbots are relatively new space), so the only thing is to try and experiment with couple of good ideas on making money from Chatbots.

Advertisement is obviously not the only way of earning money in the chat bot space. There are multiple other ways like — affiliate marketing, cross-selling, up-selling, etc. I believe that these channels too will help developers sustain their development efforts and build great products on chat bots.

I have few things in my mind which I would like to share on how Chatbots will help serving the needs of people and thereby making room for other services to loop in and charge for their services.

Just to give an idea, if a bot helps you on how to do your simple daily tasks like sending mails, then bot can also tell you that - hey, many other people are using this gmail service, would you like to use it?

So this way, it will behave like a personal opinion for end user which he might opt for, if information by Chatbot is good enough for him.

Now, you can think of more ideas on how to add more services to Chatbots which are not necessarily chat intensive initially (like simple tasks via account linking etc.) but will become chat intensive later on when bots could have personal opinions about the service/product when more people start using services on bots.

I would also like to mention that ChatterOn platform has started givings advertisement on messenger bots ,which might be a good start on monetization but certainly not future.

[FLGMwt]

The main goal that you have as a chatbot is maximizing your value to chat window real estate ratio.

One of the most popular bots I've written for my company just simply responds to `/officemap` with an image of that location's conference room map. Everytime someone uses it, the image fills at least a quarter of the chat window, which artificially shortens the lifespan of the messages at the top of the screen.

For that reason, I think I'd be very hesitant to pull in a chatbot that adds a single word more than the value I pulled it in for. I'd rather pay a subscription.

[mayank_zuppit]

But, chat window real estate ratio is a problem because the service which is map that you are using inside the bot does not fit the bot purpose adequately. Think, even human struggles to tell you the direction and to serve that, UI is definitely needed, so i think you are considering wrong use case or service inside the bot.

[owebmaster]

I think advertising is the best approach for digital monetization, because you don't have do invest a lot in customer relationship. I think chatbots will go through this route, too.

But most of the successful chatbots (initially) are going to be appendix of already successful apps/platforms, imo. And it is not going to be so big as people were thinking yesteryear.

[mayank_zuppit]

The reason why initial bots are not successful because they were not better than apps out there and even worst when it comes to complete time to do the same thing.

So IMO, we all must have understood by now, that we were trying to fit wrong use case in chatbots, chatbots are mostly handy when it comes to interacting with user like google search does when next step is not known to a person, they just dig deep, and check out more possibilities and so on.

[owebmaster]

I don't use conversational bots. I find it stupidity to talk with a computer pretending that it is human. By the other hand, bots with commands (like !do-something or /do-something) I think works very well, since always (like the 90s in IRC). Just like a terminal, which is very productive (an UX very common among software developers but not common users).

[mayank_zuppit]

Yes, you are right, it is many a times stupidity to talk to a bot, but again until we do not bring softwares in our natural form of talking/thinking, AI bots will not move forward, so we have to use other ecosystems to help bots grow like i mentioned integrating other common daily to daily services as mentioned in my article.

[attheicearcade]

Needs an "Ask HN: ".

[owebmaster]

And an "I" in place of "we". OP wants to discuss or advertise? Don't throw your product/company in the middle of it.

[mayank_zuppit]

done