Will Web 2.0 dollars trickle down?

The great untold story behind the Web 2.0 phenomenon is the flow of money. At this point, the money is flowing from the venture capitalists and the acquirers directly to the entrepreneurs who created the companies. There's nothing illogical about that, per se, but when you think about what Web 2.0 means (basically an Internet community), and you look at who actually provides the value (the users), you have to wonder when the money is going to start to trickle the rest of the way down the line. CNET News.com has an article about one company, Revver, and how it's tying user-generated content to payment.

The Deal wrote about Revver, and it's revenue sharing model, just about a year ago. Essentially, Revver serves ads when it plays a user-generated video, and shares the revenue with the video's creator. Revver's revenue-sharing model is drawing some people, like Kent Nichols, the co-creator of Ask A Ninja (See video below the fold), to move from YouTube to the more profitable video site.

Compensating Web 2.0 users is a controversial topic. Some of the more outspoken Web 2.0 figures think money has no place in the community, that money will taint the unfiltered results, rendering the sites useless. Jason Calacanis, who made his fortune by paying people to blog for Weblogs Inc., which was eventually sold to AOL, disagrees.

Calacanis made news when he lured some of Digg.com's most powerful users to the newly redesigned Netscape, a mainstream-ish, Web 2.0-ish news site. Calacanis promised to pay these users to contribute stories to Netscape, instead of Digg and other Web 2.0 news sites. The results haven't been great, unless you're one of the lucky few "power-users" who's cashing a check from Calacanis now. It seems as though a community can't really be purchased. But that doesn't mean that an existing community should become wildly lucrative for the lucky entrepreneurs while the community that made is popular doesn't share in those profits. Perhaps once YouTube is swallowed up by Google we'll see a way for the videographers to tie their very own Adsense accounts to their uploaded films. Seems like a perfect fit to me. — Brian Ward