The article describes and gives an economic analysis of a business model for commercial content delivery networks (CDN) based on the Peer-to-Peer model. The content is stored in the CDN on the hosts of the peers. An user pays for access to the content, and can sell the content to other users as in a direct sales network. The content trade is a free market. Transactions (including billing and accounting) are handled by superpeers, who receive a markup for their services and pay the content provider a gratification for every transaction. The system makes use of reputation mechanisms with a goal contrary to most P2P research: to promote content trading and discourage sharing for free. The article compares the profit obtained by the content provider in a client-server CDN and the P2P CDN, and analyzes the stable-state prices in a P2P CDN.
