As with any new technology, the same with Google Wave, as we speak, people are wondering “How can we make money from it?”. As far as I know nobody is directly making money from Wave at the moment, but that is bound to change soon, especially when wae becomes public, sometime in 2010.

How Google will make Money from Wave

Google are a company, and, as such, they want to actually make money from their product. At the moment, I highly doubt that wave is in the least bit profitable for Google, and is probably costing them money. I can only see two methods that Google can use to monetize wave:

1. Advertising – This is the method that Google is using to make money on all of their products, and I do not think that wave will be an exception to that. I expect that the full version of wave will incorporate advertising in some way, either in the interface, or somehow worked into the wave itself. The wealth of information available to Google on the Wave users should make the advertising fairly well targeted.
2. Custom Wave Setups - This would involve setting up and maintaining Wave Servers for individual companies. While theoretically anybody could set up and run a wave server, at this point, Google are the only company with any experience in it, and I can easily see larger companies wanting their own Wave servers.

Of course, the benefits of Wave for Google extend to much more than just the potential for profit, since they benefit from the huge amount of data that the wavers are making available to them, as well as the publicity associated with wave.

How Other People Will make Money from Wave

Ironically enough, other people have more ways to make money from wave than Google itself, some of which I will list below. I am not going to talk about selling invites here, since I believe that it is a very short term trend, which is ending already.

There are some monetization techniques that are common on the net, that will surely find their way to wave, for good or ill:

1. Spam - Might as well get this one out of the way first… Like any communication medium, ever, somebody is going to figure out a way to spam Google Wave, and possibly even to make it profitable. At the moment, since anybody can invite anybody to a wave, this would be easy, but the small size of the current Google Wave community seems to have limited spam attempts. The other factor which will limit them is the fact that it is impossible to send out messages without revealing who they are from, so that will make it easier to root out spammers, although I suspect that they will simply end up using disposable accounts.
2. Advertising - I can easily see people selling advertising space on popular waves (especially public ones), although this is unlikely to happen without stricter editing controls.
3. Affiliate Marketing - This is a variation on the advertising idea above. In affiliate marketing, the person gets a certain percentage of each sale of a product that comes in through their link. There is no reason why nobody is doing this on the wave at the moment, but so far I have seen no evidence for it.
4. Subscriber only waves - Another method that would require better access control, but there are many ways that this could work. It could be a community of experts that the customers buys access to, or simply a social club.
5. Sales of Bots and Extensions - There are already some companies working on this, basically the idea is to create bots and extensions, and charge a fee for their use, normally with a shareware model (the bot or extension can be used for free, but has limited functionality, or perhaps can only be used for a couple of weeks)

Of course, in addition to the methods above, people are using wave to help with their other work, as a collaboration platform. I think that we will see many businesses moving onto wave soon.

Related posts:

1. Privacy and Google Wave
2. Wave in 2010
3. What I would like to see in Google Wave
4. Google Wave Invitation Sales
5. Wave Spam