Applicability of nonmarket production and related strategies

Right next to the definition of econodfarf on everything2.com is the argument that Mozarts operas are not necessarily produced so that Mozart was financially motivated. On the other hand there are many famous composers who are creating operas "as a service" or because they got a client who proposed money for creating operas. So it can be said that it works both ways - sometimes the operas are created
by the composers because "they need money" and sometimes they create them for fun or because being a composer is their lifelong hobby, in addition to being a job.

I tend to think that same apllies to the online web services and industry as well, something that related to my occupations. Sometimes people do not know what they are creating in the beginning and what is the final features of the product that they are working on. The products in the web industry are sometimes so innovative that it is quite difficult to predict the market volume of the service or predict how "the creature" can be monetized later on. Latest example of such web products could be Twitter.com, also there I kind of remember that the first big search Youtube.com is trying to figure out even few years after the launch - how to monetize the beast.

Yahoo.com - also started for fun but later on turned out to be useful. Some day also Youtube and Twitter become profitable and find the ways to monetize their businesses.

The point is - sometimes they try to do someting for fun or for charity and later on it may turn out to be a big business. Usually someone else copies the initial idea with the more concrete business oriented intentions. Like Google made a better search engine than Yahoo, and added some additional features and innovative paid services to it ( Adwords, Adsense, Google Analytics for portals with millions of users is also a paid service, at least it was so couple of years ago ).

There are also business models that use both ways - they are open-source products and on the other hand they are aimed at financial benefit - either consultancy, installation services or software services related to open source products ( like selling Wordpress themes or providing Wordpress sites set up as a paid service ).

There are blogs that have been started for fun and later on they earn a lot of money with the blogs. Many experienced and well-paid programmers like to make programs as a hobby, some of these later on can turn out to be great commercial products. 37signals.com was one of such services, 37signals.com was also the first web portal that used Ruby on Rails programming language as the programming languages was invented by one of their founders.

So the non-market production and the commercial production are mixed and they can also support each other in the web services industry.