After thinking about the recently ended Writers Guild of America strike, it got me thinking that some of the reasons behind the strike were in actuality similar to the situation that many bloggers face.
Part of the strike was about being compensated for material delivered via new media, mainly the Internet.
At a high level, there are two types of blogging platforms where revenue is concerned. Paid subscription or license, and free ad-supported. In the paid group, there are sites like Flickr (where you can pay for a pro membership), Livejournal, and TypePad. Under the free group are sites like Vox, digg, Myspace, Facebook, etc. Actually pretty much every social network is included in this group.
It is the free group of sites that I do see a problem with. These sites are made up almost entirely of user generated content. It is really the content that fuels traffic to these properties and not functionality. This fact explains how MySpace, which is usually broken functionally, manages to surge in traffic. As said many times before, "Content is King" when it comes to social media.
As the number of active users increases, so do page views to the site. For these ad-supported models, we can also assume that revenue increases at a correlational rate to traffic. How is this fair for users?
Take Vox for example. It has come to a point where the amount of ads being thrown at you is ridiculous. Snap is even used to monetize every link you have within your blog post. Vox profits more and more as it's user's content becomes more interesting. Good business plan for Vox, bad business plan for users.
I'm not saying that people only blog for money-- that would be completely untrue. And I'm not saying users should get 100% of the ad revenue they generate either. That would also be unfair. There are obviously development, hosting, and overhead costs to run a site. But it does make sense for ad-supported sites to be able to share their revenue with the content creators. If revenue is not shared, the site is taking too much credit for content it had nothing to do with.
Pay services are better. You might pay for the amount of bandwidth you wish to use. You might get additional functionality at higher tiers. But the big difference is that users are not punished for having popular content like they are with ad-supported models.
A few weeks ago, YouTube broke ground by announcing a revenue sharing plan for content creators. I feel that this really needs to be the direction that many of the other popular sites have to begin to take. Don't let those "free" sites take advantage of your amazing content.
I think we need to call a blogger's strike if that's what it's going to take to get them to listen.
