In Pay Me for My Content NYTimes Op-ED Contributor Jaron Lanier advocates creating a online payment system that rewards anyone that comes up with original content rather than getting stuck with online advertising (PPC and Contextual Ads via Search Engines) as the mean to receive payment, indirectly or often, not at all:
"...Like so many in Silicon Valley in the 1990s, I thought the Web would increase business opportunities for writers and artists. Instead they have decreased. Most of the big names in the industry — Google, Facebook, MySpace and increasingly even Apple and Microsoft — are now in the business of assembling content from unpaid Internet users to sell advertising to other Internet users. (Disclosure: I’m the scholar at large for Microsoft Live Labs, and I once was part of a company that Google bought.)"
"...To help writers and artists earn a living online, software engineers and Internet evangelists need to exercise the power they hold as designers. Information is free on the Internet because we created the system to be that way. "
I'm not sure if Software Engineers or Internet Evangelists do agree with this point of view, and even if enough of them did, weather it would make any difference.
John Battelle has a different point of view - Grow Up?!
".....Why assume the only way to get paid is to charge directly? Why not assume a creator can be paid by inviting in companies who are willing to pay the freight so an audience or community can have the experience in the first place? And how on earth can one claim that an honest marketer, who wants to underwrite an extraordinary voice, is somehow not helping to create the experience, a patron of sorts, by its economic support allowing a creator to connect with his or her audience? "
"... And if I, or we, choose to make our content affordable by letting the right sponsors pay for it, sponsors who respect, value, and wish to support that content, how on earth is that model somehow presumably corrupt? "
"..Come on, you know the answer.....search."
"....But honestly, there are really only three players who have what you really need to make such a model happen. Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft. What do they have?
Ok, I don't really know for sure is Search is the answer - John Battelle seems to think it is - and maybe he knows this better than I do. I will certainly think about this issue over the next couple of days and I may have more to say about it later.
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