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Rough Type continues to deflate the utopian claims of the Web 2.0 acolytes.
As Om Malik reports, YouTube is splitting its much vaunted "community" into two tiers: a handful of stars who get paid for their work, and a great mass of unpaid volunteers. Malik quotes YouTube executive Jamie Byrne: “A select group of content creators will get promotion on the YouTube platform, and we will help them monetize their content ... We want to ensure that these talented people can start making a living off their efforts."
"A select group"? "These talented people"? So much for the myth of the social collective. In particular, he takes on the Yochai Benkler argument that peer production is a substitute for the price system, concluding:
I'm pretty sure that "talented people" will demand compensation (particularly when they see that a site owner - Google, in YouTube's case - is making good money off their work). That doesn't mean that there won't be a lot of people that contribute their work for free (or for a pittance) to gain attention or feel part of a community or whatever. It just means that the price system will in most cases win, and that the exceptions - Wikipedia, notably - will be exceptions. Indeed, in the vast majority of cases even the masses of unpaid volunteers will work within the price system. While the stars make good money, the masses will simply donate the economic value of their work to the site owner. The reason they'll do that is because, in isolation, their contributions have little economic value. For the successful site owner, however, all those tiny contributions, once aggregated, can turn into a large pile of cash. And I am pretty sure that Carr is absolutely right.
posted by James DeLong @ 7:56 AM | Free Culture Movement
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