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15 comments

  1. Sven A Lindalen
    March 9, 2012 at 7:32 am

    GREAT !!

  2. Rosemary Momanyi
    March 12, 2012 at 10:52 pm

    This was awesome! Bang On! Well done Gideon, I could not have said it any better….

  3. Ryan Nomad
    March 21, 2012 at 11:43 am

    question… do you think the value of the content curator to the consumer is/will be great enough that they ought to either receive some portion of publisher ad revenue or be able to realistically monetize their ‘curated streams’?

    • Gideon Rosenblatt
      March 21, 2012 at 12:39 pm

      Great question, Ryan. I think there are two answers to this. The first has to do with how we think about remuneration in the first place. In an attention economy, paying attention to someone is value. The question then becomes whether and how they later go about converting that form of value into financial value (e.g. by building a big follower-ship that helps build a consulting biz, or content purchases, etc.).

      The second way of thinking about this has to do with the more immediate conversion to financial compensation, like say, a cut of ad revenues. We are clearly not paying for the use of these online social networking services, and many have interpreted this to mean that we are the product and not the customer. But my take is a little different: I believe we aren’t the product, but the partner – someone without whom the product (in this case the stream of interesting content and social connections) simply would not exist. So, conceptually, I believe that revenue sharing (or better yet, equity building – but that’s a much bigger problem) makes sense. Google has no advertising on Google+ right now, of course, but were they to introduce that and then give users a cut, it wouldn’t be all that different from the incentives and the way things work today when bloggers, who are already playing some of this role, put Ad Sense on their website.

      Thanks for the question. What do you think?

      • Ryan Nomad
        March 21, 2012 at 2:37 pm

        well,  if you’re remixing and republishing content (say embedding a TED talk into your blog with commentary, or with hitherto unassociated content from yet another source) it seems like it’d be on you to just monetize your blog, but in this scenario, even if your mostly dealing with others content, it seems like you’re shifting into the publisher domain a bit.

        On the other hand, as regards to the ‘ought’ question; it only seems fair that people who are functioning as selective channels for media should in someway share a slice of the pie that gets  delivered to the publisher, at least if the means they use to do this simply routes people to the appropriate content (ie a facebook link).  

        Problem: There’s no real way to demand this of publishers; given that we all seem to be doing it for free anyway, there doesn’t seem like much incentive to offer to pay out to existing channels. What’s more is that trying to find a way to track all of that seems daunting (though I speak as someone with less than zero expertise).

        Solution(?): Some smart publishing firm sees how all of this works, and launches a program under the assumption that if we’ll do it for free, we’ll do it a lot more for a chance at some cash. I don’t necessarily think that’s true (or entirely ethical), but it seems like a valid enough pretense to try out what could be a wildly successful approach to viral marketing.

Alchemy of Change by Gideon Rosenblatt is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.