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If you write articles, blogs, or leave quality comments on other blogs...or write or perform music... or perform or create visual artwork...
You’re creating content, and ‘content is king’ If so, why are you the kingmaker being treated like a serf? Read this article, ‘Sharecropping The Long Tail.’
What you’re producing is why people come to sites--and why some sites are being valued by investors and buyers in the hundreds of millions--even billions of dollars. And you’ve got nothing to show for it except a nice page on their site with some links and online friends.
A lot of the valuation has to do with the expectation that somehow all those ‘eyeballs’ reading your worthwhile content will bring in revenues. A valuable discussion was started here, The Long Tail by Wired’s Chris Anderson. One takeaway from the book applicable here is this: the better quality your content and the more specialized it is, the more it is capable of being monetized. Common, generic, low-quality stuff will not bring and keep paying customers.
In the online universe, consider releasing content first to those willing to pay a tiny premium for the advantage. Release it to the wide open Web later if you want, after together we serve those people willing to pay cash for good content.
Consider this: It isn't a debate about 'false scarcity' if buyer and seller prefer to do commerce in a private environment that provides priority access to exclusive content. The number of those buyers is not infinite but it is absolutely real and monetizable--they are your best customers or prospective customers. The scarcity of quality content is real, as is the value it provides when available. Some disregard ‘walled gardens’ as worthless (and certainly AOL is not a firm we admire), but yet in the (B2B) professional publications realm we see Aberdeen, Forrester, MindBranch and numerous others that do (at relatively low volume, for large payments from companies) what we are now offering in the (B2C) consumer realm at high volume, with micropayments-per-view made possible from our partner ISP and other sources.
Part of the value is the speed, safety and convenience provided to people who gladly will pay to avoid the hassles that come with 'free' content. They can have every page printer-friendly because it isn't advertising-supported, privacy-invasive and tracked by distant analysts. Millions of cloned ‘linkfarm’ advertising-site “hits” in the search engines benefit neither the content creator nor the searcher.
Part of the value is our advanced monetization/reputation system that provides the tools to rank and comment on all articles in the private search system, with viewed content receiving guaranteed royalty micropayments--you make money every time your articles are viewed. Some of the money for this is from the marketing budget of our ISP partner in this project, set aside in ‘escrow’ from monthly ISP fees. And there are other ways that businesspeople have long used to make money offline that are being applied in new ways to create career and money-saving opportunities for our members.
Until now the lack of a better system has poorly protected and not paid you for your copyrightable, royalty-worthy content. It has seldom even paid the owners of the sites where you publish--unless that owner sells your content and registration information to a higher bidder. The current system makes you and your content the lowest-hanging fruit in the unwalled IP Hanging Gardens. And as any seasoned businessperson can tell you, selling too cheap and hoping to make it up in volume won’t ever work--online or offline.
The more you do of what you’ve done, the more you’ll get of what you’ve got. If you will make a change now in the way you post your content--where and when--you will make a difference that we can monetize for you--sooner, not later. And you will KEEP your legal proprietary copyrights instead of merely abandoning them.
Take a long slow read of our “Modern Fable” and discuss this with your friends. Think about it. Blog about it. And check back in several days.
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