Media isn’t new – it’s news, entertainment, gossip, humor – it was around when the wheel was invented. And you can tell some things haven’t changed much since Spartacus raced his chariot around the coliseum, raging against the Occupy Rome movement.
It seems there are only three ways for a publisher to get paid. One, get money from the person who will read the manuscript (or the magazine / watch the TV show, etc). Two, distribute the thing around town for free, but charge the baker / tinker / taylor, etc a fee for mentioning them prominently on the top of the parchment scroll. Whatever.
No other way to get paid?
Some publishers can only operate as a cost, owned by a government, university or other large animal with deep pockets.
Today, browsers and mobile devices ought to allow new and imaginative mechanisms to get shekels into the publisher’s pockets.
What would it take for a think tank made up of sufficiently influential persons or bodies, that a new suggestion could bet tested out and potentially slowly creep into our daily lives, such that traditional media companies actually start to reflect, digest, adjust and adopt?
Here’s why this is important today. Traditional media companies (TMCs) have run out of optimism, patience, imagination. They can’t handle the social media layers harvesting their content, free, and using it to glue their hundreds of millions of members’ to their ipads, droids, iphones and laptops. It’s unfair.
Is it? Social media at least is innovative, and one would argue, is willing to pay for content, or share the revenue, if forced to. TMCs aren’t able to think up a way to play that actually works.
The New York Times wants me to pay $40 a month, to read the news. Are you shitting me? That just tells me that even the fanciest digital newspaper is terrified of the future and has no idea how it’s going to reach its readers profitably next year.
I believe the think tank would propose a toll booth.
A digital toll both, that connects the social reader’s identity with a media clicker that accumulates points. Yes, points – not dollars. Then, points are traded on a stock exchange. No I’m kidding. You rack up 7,592 points this month, and that’ll cost you $7 on your Mastercard, thank you. The content providers are connected at the other end: Google served 43 billion views of a Glee episode, each at 2 points. They collect half. Glee collects half.
This is a jobs creation plan for a) smart kids who have no job today, b) lawyers (sorry), c) advertising executives, d) digital publishing professionals recently laid off by newspapers, TV networks, etc.
The toll booth also solves the imminent war between social media technologies and traditional media companies: they count up the beans and share out the money.
Bonus: advertisers can award points for views of videos, click-throughs on banner ads, like-clicks, T-clicks and F-clicks. This makes it cheaper for cost-conscious readers, who can rack up lots of cost points, offset by lots of ad points, possibly incurring zero toll booth charges.
What would it take to make it real?
