Social Media Considering Pay 4 Play

I just ran across an article on Advertising Age that made all the sense in the world. I then copied part of it to our team in an e-mail. I do believe that what I wrote and what was written by the author in Advertising Age will come to pass...it makes all the sense in the world!

---- E-mail and article excerpt to follow ----

Hello All -
Just ran across the article below on AdAge and it looks like the business-heads are finally getting tired of the losses from YouTube. Even though owned by Google, which as we all know has a Gazillion dollars, they’re going to have to show a profit (or at least that they can reach break-even someday) sooner or later. Mark my words…Twitter will have to do the same thing…even if it’s charging .03 per Tweet. Just set up an account with them, put in $10.00 a month and have 333 tweets. With an estimated 12+ million users (and let’s say you lose ½ of them because of the Tweet Fee … $60 Million / month is far better than making nothing! It will happen!!!!!!
D-

HOW TO SAVE YOUTUBE

In May I wrote a column titled, "The Coming End of YouTube, Twitter and Facebook Socialism," about how, basically, a certain group of high-profile Web 2.0 companies obviously can't survive forever with their current strategies (of spending way more money than they take in). The column was inspired, in part, by a Silicon Alley Insider piece titled "YouTube is Doomed," by Fliqz CEO Benjamin Wayne, who riffed provocatively on a spring Credit Suisse report that put YouTube's estimated 2009 losses at nearly half a billion dollars. Jeff Bach of Stoughton, Wis., offered this comment:

"It could be that I am missing something simple, or maybe I'm a true doofus hillbilly, but at the moment I cannot see why implementing an upload fee for UGC [user-generated content] ... is such [a] bad idea for YouTube.

"a. An upload fee would give immediate revenue.

"b. An upload fee would cut down on the frivolous uploaders of cat videos and so reduce bandwidth costs.

"c. An upload fee would decrease the amount of content against which no one advertises.

"So what if their usage drops off?! If I were YouTube, I would be happy to make some amount of money off a smaller user base rather than my current half-billion loss off a huge user base. The users that go elsewhere become someone else's zero-revenue problem."
Jeff, not only are you no doofus hillbilly, you're a reasonable, logical heartlander -- from my home state of Wisconsin, no less -- who's good at math, and I love you for it. By the way, it's worth pointing out to naysayers who question the efficacy of an upload fee: A certain company called eBay had no problem at all getting huge while imposing all manner of what are, basically, upload fees.