DayTripr : Monetizing Other People's Work

Guy Kawasaki's recent blog post on Fanpop hit a nerve with me. DayTripr is going to be a site that makes use of "user generated content," but I'm uncomfortably aware of the nasty power imbalance that that can imply. I've pretty much decided that the "we own and/or permanently-licence-for-free-forever everything you do" model is not the right way to go.

Om Malik sums it up nicely:

"...aren’t we seemingly commoditizing our most valuable asset - time. We become the outsourced workforce, the collective, though it is still unclear what is the pay-off. While we may (or may not) gain something from the collective efforts, the odds are whatever “the collective efforts” are, they are going to boost the economic value of those entities. Will they share in their upside? Not likely!"

The argument for a site like del.icio.us is that the minor effort required to bookmark a link is more than offset by the value the site provides. I'm not sure if that would be true for a site like DayTripr (writing up a day trip is harder than clicking a bookmark button) and I've been thinking a lot about what that implies.

There is added value to be found in aggregation and analysis, but raw material needs to be paid for, and I think sites need to pay (not necessarily in money) for the content they're made of. It needs to be something more than gold stars, though.

I'll be exploring some of my (mostly stolen) ideas on how exactly to go about that in upcoming blog postings.