On the payroll
I always get rounded up when I listen to Jason Calacanis, often food for good thoughts. Listened to the last episode of Venture Vocie where he is interviewed by Greg Galant. They of course get into the topic of paying the top bookmarkers, they also evolve on this, to not only limit it to social bookmarking sites but also could you pay the top searcher at Google, the top contributer at Wikipedia or who contributes enough to get paid and is it ok to get paid?
Well to start with I’m a firm believer of that the internet structure will gradually develop into being more and more integrated with the physical society and thereby also the business rules that are applicable in the regular society will also or maybe is already applicable to the internet. As Joe Krauss of Jotspot puts its it in this video: It’s cheap to start a site but not to build a company.
However now to my point, why shouldn’t contributers get paid? Bloggers get paid, writers get paid, webmasters get paid so why shouldn’t people who are contributing to several million dollar business’s be allowed to get their share of that revenue and earning. However I don’t say that all contributors should get a piece of the cake, however those who are excellent in contributing, generating content and traffic are, as far I’m concerned totally entitled to some payment for this. I would say Dirk Nowitzki contributed to the success of the Mavericks last season and the earnings that Mark Cuban made of the team last season, thereby of course Nowitzki is getting compensated finacially for this, quite well I would say. So Mavericks might be something like ten or twenty times the size of Digg, but why shouldn’t a person that contributes to 2% or 3% of the top stories get some sort of compensation for this contribution?
My references to the sports world is also that the majority of people that are doing some kind of sports just do it for fun, for their personal amusement, on some level that is also what is happening on social bookmarking sites. The vast majority of visitors are not contributing and thereby just lurking around for fun and to see if some cool articles have shown up. But some are really good at creating content for these sites, both finding articles but also writing the right header and description. That’s what make a good social bookmarker and not all people have the ability, time or passion to become a top contributor hence as top athletes or top performers in any area they are entitled to get compensation since their work is clearly generating money to the site.
[Tags] Calacanis, Venture Voice, Bookmarking, Netscape, Jotspot, Greg Galant, Mark Cuban[/Tags]
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