Doing some more thinking about Lessig’s post regarding the semi-sharing philosophy of YouTube, and how this relates to the idealistic Web 2.0 idea of information being freely shared (”true sharing”) by others. In the most cynical view, Web 2.0 exploits free labor of the masses so the site gets all the traffic and profit.

Something that bugs me is how this user-content supporting a website story is a bit familiar. Back in the days of Web 1.0, there was MP3.com (Wikipedia) which was largely based on user-contributed content in the form of music, mostly by artists who didn’t have record labels (I had some of my own stuff on the site).

Anyhow, MP3.com proved far more generous than YouTube in terms of giving something back to the content creators. They had a payment system to give money back artists for song purchases. They offered CD duplication services. They even let many of the artists who had content posted on YouTube in on their IPO. Perhaps the latter was yet another symptom of .com bubble-sickness, but you can’t deny it was extremely generous.

As you may predict, the story didn’t end well as MP3.com imploded into yet another .com casualty. Maybe their idealistic free-information style would have worked better in Web 2.0, or perhaps it was just plain stupid. However, I feel there a lesson as to the value of giving back to the content creators.

Eventually, content creators are going to want something more than just internet fame and eyeballs for their labor. It’s one thing to create content and hand it over willingly to an unprofitable start-up that needs user content to get going (maybe that’s one reason for the perpetual “beta”). It’s totally another to hand it over to a multibillion dollar company sticking ads all over everything and trying to make mint off of you. Every user has different reasons for contributing to a Web 2.0 site, but for me personally, it comes down to trust that I’m not being unfairly exploited for someone else’s monetary gain.

On the other hand, maybe the example of MP3.com shows that generosity makes everyone feel good, but isn’t a sustainable business model.

The answer is likely somewhere in between, where YouTube is: sharing to a certain degree but ultimately someone has to pay for all the generosity. After all, YouTube now has several billion reasons why their “fake-sharing” model has succeeded.

But time will tell, and ultimately Lessig’s idealistic vision of Web 2.0 may very well win out, possibly during Web 3.0.

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