What is a business, revenue, and advertising model?

What are some companies that have an analogous business model to Mint? In other words, they offer a valuable free service to consumers, and then the company can sell targeted advertising and high value leads that the company knows a ton about to generate revenue. Can be in any industry.

• Answer:

  Since you didn't list any industries, I could list hundreds of companies. Why? Because you just described every company that sells advertising. Or a whole lot of them. The below was an image that popped up around the time Facebook IPO'd. That seems to fit what you're looking for? So does Facebook fit? Do they provide a free service? Yup. Do they sell targeted advertising? Double yup. Does it generate revenue for companies? Sometimes. So what other companies do this? Well, let's see and let's group them by industry: Social Media: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn... basically all of them. Search Engines: Google, Yahoo Email Providers: Google [again], Yahoo [again] News: Basically all of them. Video Services: YouTube Free TV: ABC, NBC, etc. used to operate like this. However, the targeting at this level is terrible so it's harder for them to do this. In addition, most free online mobile applications serve ads for the same reason. The interesting thing about this is that the more targeted the ads can be the more valuable they are. This explains Mint (cause they only show a few different types so they don't compete on topic) and Facebook / Google (since they know everything about you).