I question whether a lot of people who write amateur content for the web are motivated by money though. Ultimately writing online is more about reputation and recognition than about getting directly paid to write words.

It IS nice the way the site context prods people to write more useful content (e.g. “How to Make a Good Resume”), and less regurgitation (the typical me-too blog post about techcrunch article de jour that blogs are often full of. No offense ;->).

Recycling old, broken concepts is a symptom of the hype surrounding web 2 and is it a sign of a bubble? Service economies follow a four-year growth, four-year bust cycle - or have we forgot that?

This week I decided that I would try out Squidoo for a topic that I’m interested in that is completely out of the realm of what I usually blog about. I thought it would be a good alternative to creating another blog for my other interests.

But now that I have my “lens” public, I feel like it’s a dead end. There’s no way to find out how much traffic it sees (other than the ambiguous page ranking), and no way for readers to provide feedback as comments or in a forum format that would keep the content fresh. It’s just a one-way street and doesn’t really fit into the whole Web 2.0 collaboration mindset.

I’m interested to know if HubPages will offer any community building functionality that’s missing from Squidoo.

Some, but not all, Squidoo lenses are briefly-annotated link collections. The http://oakleafblog.blogspot.co.....ethod.html post has links to four of my lenses with varying amounts of original content. For a comprehensive lens, try http://squidoo.com/TheBlackScholar.

I’m looking forward to your “write-up on Squidoo.”

–rj

You’re right though, I had forgotten about About.com, although I believe that About, even when it was called (what did it used to be called? I must be getting old) something else, paid a flat fee and then added rev share on top of that. They used the flat fee to attract people who had the most experience and could be relied on to constantly generate good content.

The same could be said of blogs in general, but the fact is that people have many different motivations to produce content. Some want to make money, some want to build a reputation, and others are satisfied to contribute to the discussion on a topic they care about.

I don’t quite agree, because blogs by their very decentralized nature are always going to have a different, far wider demo then those who get paid to contribute to a rev-share ad supported website. Squidoo, eHub, etc. are trapped in a space which attracts those seeking profit, but lacking skills to montetize it any other way. Blogs are different because there is no centralized motivation. And remember that 90% or more of blogs are total crap with very limited long-term value. For a Squidoo to be successful, it needs to bring that 10% into the fold, but I don’t see a way they can do it that would make sense economically.

There were a lot of failed “pay users to surf” concepts in the 90s that failed, but there were also a few successful revenue sharing concepts. A few that come to mind:

Amazon shares revenue with website owners who drive traffic to them.

Ebay shares almost all revenue with users.

Craigslist lets users keep all revenue.

Blogger (and most other blog tools) share ad revenue.

I think About.com still shares revenue.

Of course all the ad networks share revenue. And search engines are basically a revenue sharing mechanism.

>There are tons of good, knowledgeable
>writers around who may try this, but
>once they see the paltry returns,
>they’ll have no incentive to keep
>producing content.

The same could be said of blogs in general, but the fact is that people have many different motivations to produce content. Some want to make money, some want to build a reputation, and others are satisfied to contribute to the discussion on a topic they care about.

The concept of asking people to come to a centralized site, without any upside from a community angle, is so yesterday. This concept can best evolve in a decentralized manner with a aggregator providing a robust search across them. This is precisely what we aim to drive towards at iNods.

It will be interesting to see more thoughts on HubPages considering the severe criticism Gather gathered

There are inherent problems with this model because at the end of the day, you’ve got people being paid a very small amount of money to product what needs to be very valuable content.

There are tons of good, knowledgeable writers around who may try this, but once they see the paltry returns, they’ll have no incentive to keep producing content. Then you have the people who don’t mind the low pay because no one, and I mean no one, is going to pay them for their insights anyway– because they don’t really have any.

Sure, there may be a few good pages in the network, maybe even hundreds. But you need tens if not hundreds of thousands of great pages to make this work.

The whole Squidoo-and-similar concept seems a step backwards in a web 2.0 world to me. Yes, it may be “user generated content”, but only by one user (’lensmaster’)—hence, I don’t really see the read-write web in that, and the conversation.

So here we have some weird mixture between an aggregator, a dictionary and a link list. We also have the “lensmaster”, in summary: an editor, a channel, and consuming masses?

That sounds very 1999…

But my question remains … how much money? And are all writers created equal? Are all writers equally talented and prolific?

We’re looking at the same issue (paying writers) at Top Ten Sources, especially since a bunch of us started as bloggers, so we’re more than sensitive to promises about writers making money. Still I would rather underpromise and overdeliver on this “make writers rich” business model.

Ultimately, I wonder what kind of exit strategy you can have if you’ve got a labor pool of writers who expect a nice big slice of the revenue pie as part of your value proposition. It reminds me of General Motors and the UAW. If you’ve promised to pay your content creators a pile of riches … in the end, how does that burden your company and who gets to be the paymaster on payday?