Comments on: Community = Copy Protection

By: The Raging Debate Over The Link Economy | The Noisy Channel

The Raging Debate Over The Link Economy | The Noisy Channel — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 20:16:41 +0000

[...] I cite my own blog post (also inspired by one of his posts) about monetizing community because participation is inherently uncopiable. It’s hard for me to agree with him more strongly than [...]

By: Free Advice to the NYT: Monetize Community | The Noisy Channel

Free Advice to the NYT: Monetize Community | The Noisy Channel — Fri, 15 May 2009 17:59:17 +0000

[...] wrote a couple of months ago that “Community = Copy Protection“. It may also equal business model protection. Of course, the New York Times would have to [...]

By: Tish Grier

Tish Grier — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 16:08:14 +0000

I’d certainly love to see a company try it–and see the results of pay to comment on the level of discourse. (although I do know that private communities with stringent review of participants does indeed boost the level of discourse.)

By: Daniel Tunkelang

Daniel Tunkelang — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 15:54:39 +0000

I realize that money as a barrier can be problematic. No solution is perfect--some people even complain about CAPTCHAs--and not just because of issues for readers with disabilities. But the present quality of comments on popular blogs is pretty bad, as are the comment threads at major newspapers like the New York Times. Some kind of entry barrier seems necessary. And if that can double as a way of funding content, it's two birds with one stone!

By: Tish Grier

Tish Grier — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 13:44:31 +0000

Daniel–thanks for the clarification on FriendFeed. I haven’t used it since it started, when there were some conversations going on. And there was much discussion on tech blogs about the effect of FriendFeed on commenting (you’d have to check old Techmeme stuff to find them.)

Although I have to agree that the quality of conversation on sites just might go up if a paid model was instituted. This may work if some conversations were paid while some remained free. Then again, it may not work on newspaper sites for a number of reasons (or, shall we call them excuses) including “censorship.” Paid comments, though, might just help pay for staff to properly moderate.

By: Daniel Tunkelang

Daniel Tunkelang — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 13:10:21 +0000

Josh, I do like the idea of paying for increased interaction–in fact, I think that highly popular online sites might consider restrict comments to paid subscribers–both to raise revenue and to raise the overall quality of the comments. Today that’s probably unthinkable (I can imagine the outcry from the WWGD crowd), but it is a lot more appealing to me than the ad-supported model.

And Tish, my own experience of FriendFeed is that it is a source of traffic, not a siphoning of it. You can’t really have a conversation on an aggregator.

By: Tish Grier

Tish Grier — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 06:03:13 +0000

You’re right about not being able to copy community. As I recall, a while back there was some discussion about FriendFeed siphoning off comments from blogs and other places where the comments would usually be located. What ended up was that conversations were starting without the benefit of commentary from the person who originated the thought. So, even if comments begin to be scraped and included with scraped content, if the author of the post isn’t part of the conversation, the conversation will either exist among those of that community or will drift back to the original source. It’s a curious and fun thing to contemplate, that’s for sure.

By: Josh Young

Josh Young — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 05:33:27 +0000

Yes, Kelly does leave out community and participation. But, to be fair, it seems like you and Masnick are thinking about inspiring a community to be monetized indirectly (e.g., via advertising), while Kelly’s thinking about goods and services that can be monetized directly.

Meeting you all in the middle, however, is a post I wrote a couple weeks back. Although there’s an element of what Kelly might call “patronage,” I think it offers a interesting idea for monetizing community and participation directly.

http://networkednews.wordpress.com/2009/02/11/no-micropayments-maybe-charity-yes-freemium-news/

(Sorry if you’ve already seen it.)

By: Daniel Tunkelang

Daniel Tunkelang — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 03:09:46 +0000

That’s awesome, thanks for the link! But he actually doesn’t include community / participation in his list, which is a surprising omission.

By: Josh Young

Josh Young — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 02:45:04 +0000

I think this is what you’re looking for. It’s a bit ethereal, but it’s also a classic.

http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2008/01/better_than_fre.php