It’s a face-off between new and traditional media at the Web 2.0 Summit.
Representing new media, in a discussion over the future of journalism, are Federated Media’s John Battelle; Marissa Mayer, who leads Google’s search services and consumer products like Chrome; and Huffington Post CEO Eric Hippeau. Arthur Sulzberger Jr., publisher of the New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal’s top editor, Robert Thomson, stand in for the old guard.
by C.W. Anderson, Assistant Professor, Department of Media Culture at the College of Staten Island
Business models are important–but questions like “what kind of journalism best integrates with the nature of 21st-century democracy and society?” are also practical problems.
When newspaper executives met in Chicago last week to discuss new business models for the industry, they expected to hear from Steve Brill about his well-publicized venture to charge for online content.
Another weekend goes by and another old school newspaper guy writes a long screed condemning Google as a menace hellbent on destroying all that is good and right in the news business.
Allow me to propose something crazy. Tech companies should start charging people to use their services. No, seriously. Let’s take the biggest example of a Web site that has no clear path to profitability: Facebook.
This certainly isn’t the first time it’s been proposed, but it appears that the RIAA is potentially warming up to the idea of a “music surcharge” that would have ISPs pay $5 a month in order to allow anyone to share music online. Just a month ago, we were discussing why this is a bad idea.
With about 300 million page views a day, Wikipedia by some estimates could be worth many hundreds of millions of dollars if it sold advertising space. It doesn’t. Wikipedia’s business plan is, basically, to hold out a tin cup whenever it runs low on funds, which is very often. When it comes to money, “we are about as unsophisticated as we could possibly be,” Executive Director Sue Gardner said as she swept up Styrofoam packing nuts in the office in San Francisco, the foundation’s home since it relocated in January from St. Petersburg, Fla. “It’s time for us to grow up a little bit.”
Now that Revver has been sold to LiveUniverse, and LiveVideo has been officially launched, what’s the future for Revver’s business model? After all, it was just a few months ago that Revver revealed they’d paid $1 million to content creators since opening their doors to the public.
I know it’s kind of quaint to wonder about business models with Web 2.0 companies, and a number of people (including Fred Wilson) have argued that start-ups shouldn’t worry about monetization until they get some scale, but I have to say that I felt that old twinge of concern when I first saw Scribd, which just relaunched with a new format and features, including its own Flash-based document viewer. I think the service is great, but the business angle kind of makes me wonder.
The question of business-model timing seems to come up weekly with regards to some start-up. As Twitter usage has grown, have they f’ed themselves out of a real, sustainable business model? And has Pownce done something right by launching with a business model? Personally I prefer that a start-up come out of the gate with a business model–perhaps it’s the accountant in me.
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