Remember the old Napster of the late ‘90s? Yes, the one that invoked the ire of Lars Ulrich of Metallica. Those were the days of the wild-west Internet with little to no constraints; proceed at your own risk. Content being freely accessible was the rule rather than the exception, but a few recent developments might be pushing the needle further in the direction of pay for content.
The Internet’s explosive growth was based on the notion that almost everything was free and accessible from virtually anywhere. Along comes Rupert Murdoch and his plan to start charging for access to The Times. He’s not the first to implement a pay-for-content model, but it’s a bit of a paradigm shift when the second-largest media corporation in the world actively works to prevent news aggregators like Yahoo and Google from presenting their news to the public for free.
The implications are large for the general public, given that we are accustomed to free information. However, if this becomes the prevalent business model, I suspect we will all begrudgingly evolve to accept the new status quo (e.g., airline baggage fees).
YouTube is now working to allow users to monetize their own videos. Creating a new revenue stream is great for YouTube/Google of course, but this also puts power into the hands of the content generators to monetize their work.
The obvious parallel here is iTunes opening up a huge market for independent musicians and application developers. Steve Jobs successfully monetized the old Napster model and legitimized the digital distribution of multimedia. Now YouTube is going to allow payment for content on demand.
It’s great that Jason Laipply can make money on the 142,718,505 views (as of 5/4/10) of his über viral video, The Evolution of Dance, but what can this do for non-profits, associations, political campaigns or chambers of commerce?
Imagine a non-profit holding their annual fundraising gala and then offering the videotaped celebrity keynote speech via YouTube for a small donation. A political campaign could hold an exclusive fundraiser and make a behind-the-scenes video with the candidate, available for a small contribution to the campaign. A membership-based association or chamber of commerce could offer piecemeal video content to non-members, boosting revenue, and possibly piquing interest to grow the membership base.
Watch this story as it develops, because this may change the way we all consume content that we previously took for granted as free. The evolution process will be slow, but the potential application of the pay-for-content model is certainly intriguing.
Tom has over ten years of experience in architecting web applications, having developed software for numerous government agencies and political campaigns during the '04 and '06 cycles.
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