Peer-to-Peer Direct Sales
Adam Wierzbicki, K. Goworek · 2005
The article describes and gives an economic analysis of a business model for commercial content delivery networks (CDN) based on the peer-to-peer model. The content is stored in the CDN on the hosts of the peers. A user pays for access to the content, and can sell the content to other users as in a direct sales network. The content trade is a free market transaction (including billing and accounting) handled by superpeers, who receive a markup for their services and pay the content provider a gratification for every transaction. The system makes use of reputation mechanisms with a goal contrary to most P2P research: to promote content trading and discourage sharing for free. The article compares the profit obtained by the content provider in a client-server CDN and the P2P CDN, and analyzes the stable-state prices in a P2P CDN.