Unpaid Creators

Now the Guardian’s Vic Keegan poses the question: how will content creators be paid? Somtimes it seems like history is repeating itself – in very short cycles this time. Few years ago pundits asked: how will people keep on creating free and open source software?

The answer was not obvious, but a couple of years onwards more free and open source software is being created than ever before and software coders still do not get paid (at least directly). Now the same is happening to creative content and affecting authors, journalists, publishers, broadcaster, filmmakers etc.. As some OpenBusiness models show: the value chain is being disintermediated and attention is a new currency. Look for example at Revver.
We can learn a lot from OS business models in this regard. More about this later. Here a quote from Vic Keegan:

“We are at the start of a creative revolution on the web, enabling millions of people to publish their own videos, music, photographs, books, blogs or whatever, and it is important to make sure it doesn’t turn into a rip-off for a new breed of intermediaries. Content is king, but the king has yet to be voted a stipend.”