Financial efficiency is the premier performance measure for most systems. Existing economic ecosystems for distribution of multimedia leave a lot to be desired: client-server platforms do not scale well resulting in substantial operational costs, whereas peer-to-peer platforms cannot police copyright control and are thus notorious for not being able to capitalize on its vast delivery potential. In this paper, we introduce an economic model that aims at predicting financial performance of both

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... ient-server and viral distribution systems for multimedia. The model consists of several probabilistic components: a global scale-free viral network of users and a localized user-behavior model that abstracts marketing, pricing, and executed transactions. The model uses simulation to predict relative economic behavior. In order to showcase our model, we compared the popular "online store" distribution system to the recently proposed offline incentive-based viral ecosystem for multimedia. We also constructed an efficient dynamic pricing scheme and evaluated its performance in considered multimedia distribution scenarios.