
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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?<p>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.<p>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&#x2F;product when more people start using services on bots.<p>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.
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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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attheicearcade
Needs an "Ask HN: ".

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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

