The Scott Karp wrote an excellent article on the ‘Democratizing the Economics of Content’ and raised a fundamental issue that is being discussed but in a hush-hush manner.
He argues that the user generated content is being exploited by the blogs as they earn their ad revenue which never gets to the person who wrote the content.
If you take a look at the blogosphere at this moment all the top sites like MySpace/YouTube are based on user generated content.
Most of the users are not aware of their earning potentials and these sites have though given the tools of the content generation to the users but have kept the marketing rights solely with them.
It is also true that many users who participate in these sites are there because they get a platform where their voice is heard but these very sites who make the $$$ out of it deny these users their legitimate share. Neither of these top user generated sites, like YouTube, MySpace, gives its users any option of getting even an iota of massive amount of money generated.
At this present moment the blogosphere content generation is so crowded that first there is scarcity of original content and secondly many just want to write so that they could be heard irrespective of the fact what their economic value can be, but attached to this is the fact that not all blogs and user generated content is economically viable.
As far as Google is concerned, it has its own revenue sharing model called Adsense which it uses to not only generate revenue for itself but for the bloggers also.
But this can change very fast as the immense potential of blogs as advertisement tools is being realized and as more and more ad revenue is coming, these sites might have to come up with some model to distribute their share to the original producers.
Via: Blogherald
