Designing Bots

Chapter 13. Monetization

A wise person should have money in their head, but not in their heart.

—JONATHAN SWIFT

WHY ARE WE TALKING about making money in a design book? Well, many aspects of business are tightly connected to design choices. Understanding how your bot is going to drive revenue is an important part of understanding your engagement with your users.

Let’s get one thing clear: a bot is a type of user experience, and a way to expose products, services, or a brand. The only way to make money out of bots, without having a service or a product, is to be a bot builder and have someone pay you to build that bot. End users do not pay for bots, they pay for the services the bots expose; they pay for the products they promote and they are influenced to connect to the brands they represent. But still, in the same way we now have companies that call themselves mobile businesses because they make most of their revenue through mobile, we are going to see more and more companies calling themselves bot companies.

Key takeaway

End users do not pay for bots, they pay for the services the bots expose.

In this chapter we will review the direct and indirect ways that bots can drive revenue. This is not a comprehensive list, as I am sure entrepreneurs will come up with many other ways to make money in this industry.

Subscription

This is currently the most common way that bots drive revenue—the bot provides an ongoing service that the user subscribes to and pays for.

An example of a subscription-based ...