Pay For It (because you want to)...
Someone should launch a site called Pay For It.
The idea is simple... you can enter a link, description, and intended
recipient, and then pay real money into an account, simply for the
fact that you appreciate the content at the end of the link.
For example, I just read an article written by David Pogue entitled,
"Bing, the Imitator, Often Goes Google One Better". Simply for this
discussion, I went ahead and created a bit.ly link for it:
http://bit.ly/VnGuN It's a very nice, well written article on Bing,
Microsoft's search engine. Now, I know that Mr. Pogue gets paid by The
New York Times, but neither the Times nor David gets much monetization
at all from the 4 or 5 ads presented on the same page as his post. How
much money will they make over the lifetime of that post? I don't
know, but I can guarantee you, it's not much.
So the final step at Pay For It is to designate an intended
recipient of my money, which in this case, will be a 50/50 split
between David Pogue and The New York Times corporation.
So, after I enter this information, I'll pay fifty-cents. How did I
come up with that number? I don't know... it's just what I feel like.
At www.PayForIt.com, I can not only suggest links to content that
other people might be willing to pay for, but I can see how much money
the community at large thinks something is worth.
Yes, you need to use REAL money.
And the link doesn't need to be to news articles - it can be
whitepapers, photographs, whatever content you believe has monetary
value, and you want to pay for it.
Finally, the money would REALLY be sent to the recipient, perhaps with
a tiny management fee subtracted.
If anyone would like to try this out, let me know. It's time that the
community at large starts to pay for things found online that have
value. If newspapers and other content channels are too afraid of
losing audience if they start charging for work that really has value,
I'll do it for them.
