Making Money on The Web

A discussion asks how in the era of the Web As Copy Machine From Hell can the artist use scarcity as a means to increase or preserve the value of art.

First, the medium of distribution has nothing to do with the value of the art as meaningful.

On the other hand, no product no market no sale no pay.

Copy protection simply won't work anymore. It’s of no value to fight the machine/human interface behaviors. It simply won’t work.

The Internet figures values in terms of URLs as coin of the realm. Wealth is created as a scalar applied to the functions such as edit, copy, delete, revise, publish, yadda.

All Internet business models must first describe the process or means for URL production. You don’t want to stop copies; you want to be sure that the right URLs are created during the copying. Essentially, that is what the web services for any business model eventually come down to.

A social network is a URL amplifier.

1. Release the video.
2. Post the video.
3. Watch the download stats for the URLs.
4. Rate, collect, respond to inquiry, invoice or acknowlege, in other words, sell or discuss.

This isn’t hard. Everything I need (now) to create and sell product is managed from a single desktop. While it is not true for any communications industry model, it is essentially true at all scales of application.

Don’t think in terms of scarcity of copy. It is scarcity of talent and ideas that drives the production of significant URLs.

It will always come back to quality, fidelity, novelty, the gig, and the deal.

If I may ramble a little more: the big picture sea change so trivial it’s barely noticed is that web 2.0 is evolving toward a mass notification system where the messages are controls, that is a a message and link to a page for the purpose of task-orienting.

It’s a cosmic merely to the RSS/Atom community of feedfans, but in terms of higher order social norm organization, it is significant in that at one scale it is organizing your acts, at another, it is reorganizing your DNA. Still another cosmic merely to the social theorists.

At the monetization level, it is the very key to the product evolution. There are any number of public services that can avail themselves of Facebook, Twitter, etc., and these are subscription services.