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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