This is how I think a crypto-based business would make money. Welcome to comment:
One of the biz models that I think that has relevancy from the current model is YouTube’s biz model. Let me try to explain.
First, let’s ask the question: how does youtube make money, as all videos are free to watch? Answer: YouTube is building a community of content providers, and when this community reaches certain critical mass, advertisers wants to get into the action and are willing to folk up actual capital (i.e money) to get a piece of the attention real estate. And youtube get a middle-man cut from this transactions, as not 100% of advertising fees are distributed to the content providers.
Now, substitute YouTube with X dApps. X dApps is building a community of content providers, and when the community reaches certain critical mass, advertisers will want to get into the action and are willing to folk up actual capital…but here is the fork(pun intended) : Advertisers pay to get the tokens of dApps, and the blockchain smart contracts will distribute the tokens based on the rules of the contracts to the content providers. Now, how does the dApps developer get paid? By placing itself next to the content providers, and the payout ratio for this dApps developer will be a fraction of what the content providers are getting. Win-Win-Win. Advertisers win by getting to access content providers; Content providers win by getting paid for the contents contributed; dApps developers win by getting paid for the community that they are building.
How does the tokens get value? Tokens have value because of the same reason that money has value, i.e. because of trust. When people trust a commodity and give it value, it becomes a currency, that’s the same reason why fiat has value and why gold had value in the first place. So when a given commodity is given value, the value changes in accordance with one of the oldest rules in economics, Supply and Demand
Make sense?