Free Media: Who Pays?

In keeping with getting paid for reuse, let's have a look at an article on MediaPost, via a note from the BoSacks Reporter. This is a must-read for creatives of all disciplines, I think, because it quotes a simple and brilliant summation of the issue of media and their cost. In this formulation by Shelly Palmer, there are only three models for paying for media (with an obvious fourth):

• I pay - in which the creator absorbs the costs of producing and distributing the material


• You pay - in which the reader pays with a subscription or some other type of purchase


• They pay - in which a third party that typically wants to associate itself with the content pays


• Somebody pays - a combination of two or three of the above

The reason this is such an important formulation is that it clears your thinking of all the details - Google ads, per copy pricing, selling through Amazon, and so on - that keep you from understanding the fundamental problem. And when you look at the fundamentals, suddenly some innovations aren't so that different from what we've seen in the past:

Palmer scoffs at the notion that Radiohead's "pay-what-you-want" album sales model is at all a breakthrough. While a third of consumers who downloaded the band's latest album paid something for it, the real point of the model was to get the band's music heard to generate residual sales in the form of concerts and merchandising.

"It's really the Jerry Garcia model," says Palmer, referring to the late lead guitarist of the Grateful Dead, who encouraged deadheads to record the band's live performances and distribute and share the recording for free, because it would generate a broader marketplace for the band's music and concert tours.

When you blog or give away material, you are either underwriting everything to promote yourself or, more likely, you hope to eventually sell something to the people who come by. Again, it's that give it away and make up the promotional activity in another area model.

This reminds me of a conversation I recently had with one of my book editors. She mentioned another writer she had used - polished, capable, understanding material, but unwilling to promote. Therefore, the books didn't do that well and when he wanted another assignment, she said, "You really need to be willing to help promote, otherwise I can't give you anything."

What she said goes right back to the three models. Each part of the publishing industry has the same issue: someone has to pay. The book publisher currently depends on the audience bearing all the costs, and the greater a response, the more readily it can undertake a new book idea. The writer gets paid by the publisher, but might have to do some self-supporting work to help bring the audience to the venture that eventually pays. If there are ads, people must pay enough attention to the ads to make the third party advertisers feel as though they are getting enough for their money. Instead of sweating all the details, take some time to get to the fundamentals and answer these questions:

• What do you offer?


• Who pays for your work?


• What must you do to ensure they get what they need?


• Are tehre classic examples of business models that might work for you?