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Posted by RadiVis at 23:14
Tagged with: Economics, Free, Ideas, Media, Open, Publishers, Social media, Social networks, Subscriptions
What’s described is, as I see: not so much better than donations; already works in some places; reminds quite of “CwF + RtB”. Also, it might be in the spirit of “human attention [especially content producers' (artists') attention] is the most [or, only] scarce [non-abundant] resource”.
“donation culture” point also looks to me somewhat like basic “prisoner’s dilemma” (to which is “timeless decision theory” is relevant); and, I should say, it’s not so completely nonexistent (“buy it if you like it” [q]).
Additionally, don’t you think there’s so much commercially successful content which isn’t even worth your time, even less your money? It is not inconceivable that it would be more effective for such content to not get created at all.
Besides all the form of “content” I would also like to remind about such form of content as “hardware specifications” (yes, lack of openness of those still causes problems). It is different in current forms of monetization, but is still *content* (or “informational work”, as I usually call it).
Thanks for your interesting comment. I didn’t know about this “CwF + RtB / Connect with Fans + Reason to Buy” concept, or rather that it’s called that way, yet. Of course, that’s something different from the Aura model, because the Aura model is based on subscriptions. A catchphrase that might describe it better would be “Freemium” = Free stuff + premium stuff. The free stuff in the Aura model actually is all passively accessible content, while the premium stuff is the right to active participation in the community.
Sure, there are many ways how to monetize open content in a decent way, and I see no reason for not combining different approaches.
More effective in what sense? I think it’s relatively effective for producers to spread popular commercial content, as that generates a lot income. There are actually some books, which are worth my time and money. The fact that they aren’t free and you have to pay for them, makes them less valuable, but it’s still a business model that is better than not writing those books at all.
One important aspect of the Aura model is that it’s an attention attractors. Individual content creators can implement similar systems and advertise their works on their own, but that means much more effort than cooperating with an Aura provider / publisher.
It might be able to use the Aura model to create some kind of open hardware specification network. Hardware designers would get paid for the work to make their specifications open. Such an Aura platform could be used as canonical place to discuss hardware norms or something like that.
I have been thinking about this problem too, so far my thoughts are pointing to something like this:
* there is a central (open source) tool with a distrubuted network on which all content is stored.
* Everyone has a personal account, and pay a monthly (flat)fee for access to the network (the flat fee has to take into account things like income and country etc… I can imagine that when someone is on wellfare gets a discount, and someone living in a 3rd world country would too)
* Every month the total remaining income after costs is devided between all the creators of content, based on statistics like views (the exact system needs a lot of thought)
* Users can provide direct donations to creators through the system, this has no effect on the distribution of money based on statistics
* Users can vote content up and down, this voting will increase the likelyhood of content being featured and appearing higher in rankings and search results (but this needs a lot of work to prevent manipulation)
* Creators will have to rely mostly on sponsorship, like they already do now. For the creation of content.
* Creators have the ability to sell premium stuff through their content page, like figurines or tickets to live performances.
Problems i have not solved yet.
* Creative common like licence means people could upload a version of the video with all the sponsor advertising removed, so for now this kind of stuff would only be uploadable as a sub-contribution under the main content. The modified version would share income with the parent content (probably something like 80/20)
* Not all internet connections are fast, and not everyone has good equipement, so the servers would have to store various versions on the files, realtime encoding from master sources would be expencive
* Because of the cost of entry chances of a shadow network or hacks to get in for free are a serious risk, it might be better to decouple the monthly free from the network access and have a tax instead.
* Since this is a distrubuted network files would be cached locally (to some extent) and shared when local peers view the same file, this would dramatically lower the network costs.
* The idea is that content is always streamed from the server, this means everyone needs unlimited and fast network access (and this is ofcourse not the case). This also requires that portable devices do the same streaming, and would instantly make all existing media hardware useless
So in short, it kind of works like spotify, wii-online-account and an appstore.
Thanks for your comment, tetsuo. We’ve already chatted about this, but I just wanted to say that statistics based on views sound fine, and would be quote helpful, though user ratings of the content are more important IMHO and should get more weight for determining the payment for the artists participating (and not only for the frequency at which some content is featured) in any system like that.
Addendum:
The reason i put much emphasis on “views” is that (when unmanipulated) it does say a lot about the quality of the content. Especialy 2nd, 3rd, etc… “views” by the same user are interesting.