Paying for community created content

Postbubble has an awesome article today about digg, netscape, social news and remuneration for community drive content. I think this is a really interesting area since there is inherent value in content created by the community but there is also value in giving people a soap box. In the UK speaker's corner is a really popular location (wierdly in my opinion). It is a location where people stand and speak their view on anything and everything and thousands of tourists come to watch. The speakers draw an audience which they enjoy and hyde park, london transport and local shops benefit from the dollars this audience brings. Everyone is happy and no one pays for the content... it's great.

At the moment digg, amazon reviews, wikipedia, the venerable dmoz and even webmasterworld run on a similar basis to speaker's corner... I like the sound of my own voice, I love having an audience hence I contribute. Even my own cocktail recipes site runs on this basis. There are however a new breed of sites out there that are starting to pay people to create content and this is a really interesting development since all else being equal I'd prefer to be paid for hearing my voice heard. Some examples are:

Google Video: Last night I was chatting with one of the PMs at Google on this project at a party, I am now thinking of switching my videos from YouTube to Google, they get >100k impressions a month (generated from my site) and at Google video there is a real chance I will get paid for those eyeballs.

forums.digitalpoint.com: Shawn Hogan's site has a revenue sharing forum... if you start a thread you will get a share of the revenue Shawn makes from people looking at that thread (plus you can link off the site and a few other points). Digital point has come from nowhere to be a significant enough player to challenge Brett Tabke's webmasterworld.com

Netscape Navigators and About.com guides: Digg is under threat from both these models in my opinion. Just a few people kick off most of the stories on Digg and now Netscape is paying a few people to do the same for them. If About.com get their arses in gear about web2.0 they have a long standing and highly profitable history of paying for content, arguably about.com are the most experienced company on the web today in terms of paying for content. So keep on innovating digg old buddy and find a way to keep your diggers happy or they might switch.

The old addage goes there is no better price than free and from the point of view of digg, youtube, flickr and so on that is still true but as a contributor, you know what? I want to get paid.