So I had a pretty good idea come to me the other day — I guess you would call it a “Mashup” Web 2.0 site. It would be a community driven site (as most are?) but when I started thinking about how people would use the site — I realized most people would just consume and lurk. It would be dead simple to post — but why take the time? I knew if this site existed right now, I’d use it daily but I would never contribute.
Then I thought about Squidoo (I talk about these guys a lot hmmm?). Squidoo gives out a percentage of its Adsense income to its users based on the rank of their content. This made me think — why doesn’t every site do this? Digg for instance is only popular based on the content submitted. Using this model, the people who post stories that make front page should get a percentage of the profits for that given day.
Think about it — all these new sites rely on people, so why don’t they take a part of the profit for contributing? This gives such a great driver for users to submit better and higher quality content.
Matt Brett
April 20th, 2006
It’s true - this model could do very well. More so for sites like Newsvine compared to Digg, where the majority of the articles are written by the poster instead of merely linking to it and grabbing the first sentence for the description.
BPAndrew
April 20th, 2006
Yea thats a perfect example of a site that would benefit from that. I know I’m mr “monetize everything” but I think good work deserves good pay.
Chris Oake
May 1st, 2006
OK, full disclosure, I do PR for gather.com. That said, any talk about community sites paying members should include gather.com. They pay members based on a number of metrics, including popularity and user comments. They launched in January, and they’re about to make their first payments to members. They initially expect some members to make as much as $1,000 per month.
BPAndrew
May 1st, 2006
Thats cool, I don’t mind plugs as long as its relevant to the conversation.
Made an account and clicked around for a few minutes — I’m pretty impressed so far, I’m going to try to post some content and see how it all works this week!