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The Internet has reduced the cost and increased the speed of information transfer. This has transformed the economic landscape, allowing new and exciting ways to generate revenue that include and differ from traditional economic models. Through studying and contrasting several large internet businesses, we have examined the attention, free, network and gift economic models. In order to explain in more detail how these models work, we have looked at Google as a unique business case study, because it has used elements of all of the models we studied throughout its history.

Google started off by offering a gift economy with an aim to organise and make information accessible over the internet. Over time, this developed into an attention economy which gained financial return from monetising the traffic to its pages through a customised advertising platform that tailors advertisements to viewers. By continuing to offer products and services it uses a free economic model to create an online community of users who continually return to the site (networked economy) to use Google's services.

By presenting simple explanations of the different economic models and applying them to the chosen case study, we have outlined the principles and practices which sustain internet commerce in a way that is easy to follow and understand. Through reviewing multiple online businesses we were able to focus on one that utilised multiple economic models to help explain the similarities and differences between the different ways of conducting business online.