Around six or seven years ago the subject of free site vs. subscriber-based was a big one. Big surprise that I have never waivered from free.

But I just realized how ahead of the game I was back then when I said to one editor, “we may want to charge different rates, because some of the site-users will be causing a drain on us, but others will be contributing. ya know what I mean?”

“No,” she said, which was understandable since we didn’t have forums of any kind at the time.

On a side note, at that time I was pushing for the company to adopt the Arsdigita Community System (see OpenACS ), and I admit that my notion of “paying contributors” was heavily influenced by Philip Greenspun.

Scott Karp seems to be thinking that the time has come to pay the users.

What a great way to promote Citizen Journalism (or whatever you want to call hyper-local-non-journalist-majors-traditional-media-aggregated-content)

For less than one yearly salary (I hope!) a news company could pay for ten local blog posts a day at ten bucks a piece.

10 X 10 X 365 = $36,500

Fifteen bucks if a photo, audio or video is included, of course. ; )
But really, we should just let the bloggers keep all the Google ad money, even though we might be driving traffic, and figure we’ll make it up at a higher level of long term relationship marketing.

In other words, they get the nickle and dimes and we get the gesture and attention data for the big payoff.

Sounds perfectly fair to me.

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I was just listening to a BloggerCon session on How to Make Money with Blogs hosted by Doc Searls.

ADDED: I forgot to mention the podcast is available at itconversations.com

Some felt advertising on blogs or in feeds was a viable solution while others like Dave Winer thought that was nickel and dime and missing the bigger opportunity.

I’m against ads in feeds for one reason, at least. The internet shuts off what it doesn’t want, and eventually gets what it wants.

If we haven’t yet learned this from the Music Recording Industry, Tivo etc., then I don’t think we are as far along as I thought.

Put another way, any unwanted or missing feature is an opportunity for another solution that will deliver a service without the unwanted feature or with the wanted feature.

The customer always wins on the web, because there is no scarcity.
So, the paradox works this way:
1. Ads in feeds will only work if users want them.

2. If users want them, they aren’t really ads, but content.

Most businesses use the phone. Most do not make money off phone traffic, ads, or even use it as a way to process an order. They use it to communicate in all kinds of ways.

Blogs will be used to communicate in all kinds of ways. Very few will have a business model tied directly to eyeballs or direct sales.

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