Spreading the Flickr Wealth
Anil Dash points out a potentially unfair aspect of Flickr’s (i.e. Yahoo’s) business model. Flickr makes the traditional website’s bargain with its users, trading free hosting of their content for the right to splatter it with ads. But the users whose content is most popular get no more benefit (financially, at least) than those who post only crap. Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake strikes back with the observation that (after passing through my cliche-ifier) there’s more to life than money. Flickr users, and web users in general, don’t expect to make more cash for quality content, she claims. They want attention, status, empathy… basically, they wanted to be loved, by golly!
In terms of traditional web dynamics, Caterina is definitely on the more defensible side of the argument. As she points out, if profit were the only consideration, no one with anything of any value to say would have a free blog or website. The distinct lack of capitalistic dynamics on the internet has a lot of advantages, and as I touched on in my last post, as soon as you add a dose of the profit motive to the web ecosystem, all manner of distasteful characters start to crawl out of the woodwork with loopy con schemes.
That said, I’m quite sure that if Flickr were to find a way to compensate those users whose photos are deemed most interesting by their peers, there would be a dramatic increase in the volume of high-quality pictures on the site, and the average quality would go way up. Lest we forget, capitalism ain’t all bad. Something to think about?
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Anil Dash and Caterina Fake cross-blog on Yahoo profiting from Flickr photos
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The perfect analogy
Anil Dash says Flickr should pay the users that are most interesting and therefore make them the most money. Caterina Fake says there’s more to life than money and “the culture of generosity is the very backbone of the internet.” Others weigh in -…
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I disagree with your last paragraph. I think it would increase the number of people (and their number attempts) trying to post stuff that they think is high quality, I’m not sure that the presence of remuneration itself is enough to actuall bring in higher quality people/work. At least not on a site like Flickr. Maybe if you had an online photo mag that was now just accepting volunteer submissions and started paying for photos you could garner better content (switch out photos for words for a different type of site content).
It’s different, of course, but the emergence of AdWords itself, IMO, didn’t increase the number of high quality blogs. It just increased the number of blogs, since more people had the incentive to try to make a bit of cash.
Of course, who knows. But I’m sure we’ll see a site with a model as suggested by Anil sooner rather than later and we’ll find out for real.
Comment by jtnt — 10/28/2005 @ 5:47 pm
Meant AdSense, not AdWords, above. Sorry.
Comment by jtnt — 10/28/2005 @ 5:48 pm
You are gayy.♥
Comment by Krystal — 12/11/2006 @ 11:56 pm