3 Comments

Calacanis Covets Competitors’ Contributors

Jul 18, 2006
by

Jason Calacanis, CEO of Weblogs Inc. and now GM of AOL’s new Netscape put out an offer this evening to the top contributors to Digg, Reddit, Flickr, Newsvine et all to switch and contribute to Netscape. This rocks!

I’m not going to describe or quote. Jason writes well so read what he had to say about paying contributors $1,000 a month for posting at least 150 stories.

The interesting part of this is that he ponders whether others will question paying contributors. Look at the other side of the AOL house: DMOZ / Open Directory Project. I marveled for years that AOL had thousands of poeple working for free as editors. The rest of us paid our editors. Not AOL (and before it Netscape and before it NewHoo).

Why did ODP’s editors edit for free? Well, as we later heard through the Rumour Mill, they didn’t work for free. As editors worked their way up, they got better categories and were able to make money for adding new sites. No payment appears to have led to corruption.

Web 2.0 is all about users contributing and Jason knows about Web 2.0, he helped define it. He writes about paying for quality just as he did to create a new market for paid bloggers. Again, brilliant!

Netscape and especially Netscape.com have flounder in their many incarnations over the years. Netscape helped to build the original search engines (Yahoo, Excite, Lycos and Infoseek) and then the second round of paid search engines (GoTo (formerly AOL’s biggest search partner, hold your applause), Looksmart (you can hold your applause for the death of Looksmart), About.com/Mining Company, AskJeeves (a moment of silence for the butler, please), et al). Imagine if Netscape had seen the value in the Home and Search buttons in the years before IE took the lead. Then again, AOL has opened and closed the door to AOL.com.

Kudos to Jason for his bold move. I wish him well in building Netscape.com and congratulate him on his marriage.

As for Latrell Spreewell, I just hope that Jason doesn’t choke his boss.

About David Lewis

David Lewis is the CEO and founder of 77Blue which operates online shopping websites. Prior to that, he worked in business development at GoTo / Overture. David was a product manager and accountant in past lives. In 2006, David won Commission Junction’s Horizon Award for Innovation and was a finalist for Linkshare’s Golden Link Award. You can find David on Twitter @thedavidlewis.

Twitter: thedavidlewis
Filed under: Online Publishing
  • http://www.revenews.com Jim Kukral

    I agree, this is a good move. Cunning.

    There's one thing he may have overestimated however. And that is…

    It's not always about the money.

    It pains me to say that as an online marketer, but, it's true.

  • http://www.jimmydaniels.com Jimmy Daniels

    This may be a good move for him, but I don't think it's good for these sites, wonder if there is a way to see how many stories are submitted each day, I bet it has already jumped up some.

  • http://www.revenews.com/davidlewis/ David Lewis

    It's not ALWAYS about the money… it usually is. I often find myself doing the right thing for the right reason and then I realize that there is a financial benefit to me or my company.

    The Web wasn't about money when GoTo started. Paid search was wrong. Search was supposed to be pure. In the end, paid search saved the Web.

    Selecting stories hasn't been about money. The brilliance of Jason's move is that he is taking people who have self-selected in a free (literally) market and he is going to pay them to keep doing what they love. It will be interesting to see if they want the money or if they think it is evil. I think a bunch of high school and college kids will love to get a grand a month for doing what they love to do.