I have to agree with Dave Winer when it comes to Kevin Rose’s response to Jason Calacanis’s latest P.T. Barnum maneuver.
Let me get it out of the way by saying that I think the idea of paying a bunch of people to social bookmark on Netscape (I still can’t believe they’re using that name) is nutty. Of course starting a blog network is also nutty and Jason made a ton of money by doing that- so he may be nutty like a fox.
Back to Dave and Kevin.
Kevin says:
“[U]sers like Digg, Del.icio.us, Reddit and Flickr because they are contributing to true, free, democratic social platforms devoid of monetary motivations. All users on these sites are treated equally, there aren’t anchors, navigators, explorers, opera-ers, or editors.”
To which Dave correctly points out:
“No doubt Kevin is going to make something like $20 or $30 million when he sells Digg, which seems a pretty likely outcome. What will the users get? It’s a bit awkward for him to claim they do it for love if he himself doesn’t do it for love.”
Clearly there is a “monetary motivation” to Digg, or else the very monetarily motivated VC community would not be funding Digg to the tune of at least $2.8M.
But the problem comes from perception, and the shift therein when what starts out as a labor of love is transformed into a potentially lucrative business.
I have faced the same sort of scrutiny Kevin is under now, albeit on a smaller scale. When I started ACCBoards.Com back in the nineties, it was a labor of love- at first. Then it became the most popular ACC Sports site on the net, and started costing me thousands of dollars a month in server and bandwidth charges. I needed someone to help pay those expenses, so I went out and made content deals with Jefferson Pilot Sports and Cox Media. Before I knew it, my little web site was being talked about during college football games and on SportsCenter. Eventually, after paying costs out of my own pocket to create, develop and operate the site, revenue generated by my content deals and advertising put me into the black. Way into the black, actually.
Then came the offers. I resisted them for years, until I got nervous about Bubble 1.0 and the ability of ad dollars to become infinite (now you see where that recurring theme of mine came from). I signed a deal to sell the site for many, many dollars and much non-dilutable stock- go home money. Bubble 1.0 popped about 6 months too soon, and the sale didn’t close.
When things started moving from Kent pays thousands a month to Kent makes thousands a month, a lot of my moderators (volunteers who managed the various message boards) began to ask me the same sort of questions Kevin gets asked now. I tried to answer the questions fairly- I did not play the “but you do it for love” card. Many of my moderators were satisfied, and some of them are still moderating the boards today. But many others decided to jump ship and compete with me, thinking that it was easy money. Some of them were successful and some weren’t. But all of them learned that to become successful, you have to work very hard for a very long time and, unless you get some greater fool/VC money, at your expense.
A huge part of Web 2.0 is based on monetizing user-generated content. Digg is no different from Myspace and YouTube in that regard. In fact, even old media makes money by user generated ad sales. That’s just the way things work.
I don’t buy Kevin’s argument about his users doing it for love, but I also know that it’s really hard to say “well, I had the idea first and I got here first, and that’s just how the world works.”
But that is how the world works.
Newsome.Org 