Giving Away Your Content to Make Money?

An interesting and helpful presentation there by Gerd Leonhard @gleonhard (follow him and his friends @futurefeed). If you’ve got the time there’s a few videos from the Miden 09 Conference.

This is more of an exploratory post; to gather my current thoughts and, hopefully, generate come conversation around the fairly hot topic of current Internet evolutions: Content.

I remember marveling at some amazing views of the Olympic 2008 opening ceremony on a blog post. After some digging around I found the images were screen captures from a news site who’d refused to make their slideshow embeddable… therefore they been stolen (with no link to the news site)… thus a loss of any traffic attention that would have resulted in my clicking through to their site. The music industry have been experiencing this sort of theft for the better part of this past century.

Last year I attended a conference where one record executive essentially said imagine if you had a product you’d invested a substantial amount of money into on the store shelf. A product anybody can just walk in and take… and then proceed to produce virtually identical copies and distribute it themselves, all for free. That’s what it’s like for the music industry… I can understand their initial reactions to peer-to-peer services like Napster. But this sort of activity is only going to spread to virtually anything that can be digitised. So we are certainly standing on the edge of a precipice where some choices and financial strategies need to be made.

I feel creativity must be rewarded. Musicians, journalists and writers, film makers and inventors need renumaration for their efforts. So how? New models need to be made. One quote I heard today from Jim Balsillie of BlackBerry/RIM “…you won’t recognise the music industry in a couple year from now”. So let’s get imaginative for content in general… what might it look like? What new opportunities will this bring?

I genuinely believe the evangelist’s ideas when I read/hear/see them preach on the glorious future of free content. But I’m still finding it difficult to completely grasp making money from providing free content (other than via advertising, freemium/premium or data mining). Kevin Kelly summarizes this new economy with “Where ever attention flows, money will follow”. Also to paraphrase Kelly; Ten years ago we thought the Internet was TV; only better. But it’s so much more. So it would be presumptive and wrong to believe that ten years from now the Internet will be like today; only better. It’s going to be completely different…. and so much better!

@BenAS raised the point the of community and content as a method of maintaining attention…. and it’s the longevity of attention that is most likly to lead to gross profit.

In some way the perception of free is as good as free for example introducing a small levy into ISP fees. At a stretch the perception of free can be extended to inexpensive and simple payments demonstrated by the Apple App Store or even the value add we’re willing to hand over our personal and private information for (like signing up to Wii Online). But other than these where does the money come from? Below Chris Anderson depicts four monetisation models for free content.

Okay so let’s get conversational. How can giving away content or services possibly make money? I’ll follow this post (hopefully tomorrow) with some ideas of my own… but lets try to format them like this Observation, Insight, Idea. Either post a comment or for longer thoughts write on your own blog and send a trackback to this post.

• Effective Advertising:
  Observation: People dislike intrusive and irrelevant ads
  Insight: Loud and ill-targeted ads are turn offs
  Idea: Stop making ads and start making content that will be useful for your specific audience [this is cool from BMW – I've watched about five minutes.. what ad would I watch for five minutes!? And I will next go and play with it myself for even longer... but maybe this is off topic. They are making content to promote their car; good. But different than giving their cars away and then finding ways to make money through other channels.]
• Get Attention:
  Observation: Twitter has seen an explosion in growth recently
  Insight: People love to share their thoughts and discoveries, and gather tidbits from trusted sources
  Idea: Either help to facilitate this or become a trusted source

Diagrams: Chris Anderson on The Long Tail blog

Here’s a bunch of NYtimes articles that have popped up in the past few days or so (sorry they’re all from the same source):

• They Pay for Cable, Music and Extra Bags. How About News? Link
• France Tries to Limit Internet Piracy Link
• Google Insists It’s a Friend to Newspapers Link
• Digital Piracy Spreads, and Defies a Fix Link
• A.P. Seeks to Rein in Sites Using Its Content Link

Also, and I’ll look more specifically again at mobiles in a later post: The ease and potential customer comfort with mobile apps and content as a source of pay-to-use income for content producers. And the general nature of a relatively near-future where everything is ubiquitously connected.

BTW; I was listening to the Folk & Proud compilation on Spotify (free account) while writing this post.

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