RE: New draft: draft-day-cdnp-scenarios-03.txt

["Phil Rzewski" <philr@inktomi.com>]

At 04:33 PM 3/3/01 -0800, DonE@activate.net wrote:
>Phil,
>
>Section 1, Page 3, "3.  CLIENTS Have Value"
>
>No don't remove this, but explain how CDNs relate to the advertising
>business model.  Those who want to advertise are willing to pay publishers
>to create ad content (and are willing to pay for programming content and
>distribution) such that CLIENTS see the ad content.

I can see a home for explicit mention of the ad-revenue business model. I 
think in the current draft, the explanation for "Clients Have Value" is 
kinda rolled up unintentionally with "Distribution Has Value". Notice 
Section 4.1.3:

"An example of this case is where a service provider has an aggregated 
CLIENT population which is of sufficient interest to one or more 
PUBLISHERs. In this case the PUBLISHERs are willing to pay to access the 
CLIENTs of the service provider and revenue flows from the PUBLISHER to the 
service provider."

This basically sounds like an explanation of the ad-revenue model (though 
it could certainly be clearer): The reason WHY distribution has value is 
because the ads give value to just getting it distributed "out there" as 
much as possible.

Lemme take a stab at separating it off. Basically, saying "Distribution Has 
Value" is a lot like saying "Distribution is a service you need to pay for 
no matter what". It's kind of like bandwidth in that sense: It doesn't 
matter whether I'm doing e-commerce or running a university, I need to pay 
for my dial tone. So whether I'm selling paid-use movies ("Content Has 
Value") or ad-revenue web pages ("Clients Have Value"), I'm going to need 
to pay SOMEONE for getting it in front of those eyeballs. It just so 
happens that, in the paid-use model, the publisher hopes to get back all 
they'd be paying for distribution (& then some) in the form of content use 
fees, potentially from the same Content Networks they paid for distribution 
in the first place. This may result in business models where the Access 
Content Networks actually offer "free distribution" for paid-use content, 
as long as they get a cut of the use fees. This is probably out of scope 
for us, but I like to kick it around.

>In this case DISTRIBUTION and REQUEST-ROUTING are "send only", but
>ACCOUNTING can be in either direction (and possibly "receive only").

I see I was not clear enough in that section. "Send-only" may be too 
abstract of a term, or I may just need to define it better. Any type of 
peering obviously requires two-way communication, it's just a question of 
what advertisements or payloads flow in each direction. So for 
distribution, the "payload" consists of actual content signals or content 
updates, and that's what's "send-only" in the PCN case. By the same logic, 
I'd say the "payload" of accounting peering is actual CDRs in log files, 
and hence "receive-only" in the PCN case as you say. As for 
Request-Routing, as the requirements draft currently states, we're really 
looking at advertisements flowing in both directions (area, content), and a 
PCN would only be doing "content advertisements".

I'll plan to make this stuff clearer, assuming people continue to see some 
value in enumerating this kinda stuff. :)

--
Phil Rzewski - Senior Architect - Inktomi Corporation
650-653-2487 (office) - 650-303-3790 (cell) - 650-653-1848 (fax)