All this leads us to the fourth and final gear, monetization. Whereas crossing the chasm is definitely a pay-as-you-go model, the four gears represent a “URL” approach (not uniform resource locator, but rather “Ubiquity now, Revenue Later”). Most of the great consumer Internet successes in the first decade of this century followed this approach, introducing the monetization gear very late in the game, in some cases not until after they had sold themselves to a monetization engine (YouTube to Google, Instagram to Facebook, Tumblr to Yahoo!).
