Episode 15 On Content Monetization

Beginner's mind

Have you ever tipped someone on the Internet, for an article you read, or for an answer you get? For me, it’s always interesting why people pay for the content, while majority of the information on the Internet is free, Wikipedia, Quora, or articles on New York Times, Buzzfeed, you name it. So what we are actually paying for? What do you think about the tipping model?

01:00 Have you heard about Jelly? It’s a platform that you can ask questions anonymously, and get answers from users on the platform. The company brand the product as the new way of search on mobile. We started with Jelly, the online Q&A platform, and then slowly get into the topic of content monetization. Bo talks about his main point: nothing on the Internet is free. We talked about soft advertisement, sponsored content, Instagram and Medium.

24:00 An interesting feature that I’ve been interested in is tipping articles on Wechat. I am interested in why people decide to tip articles they read, and how people feel about paying for information on the Internet. Bo explains the rationale behind it in his nerdy way – calculate how much every minute worths when you read the article if you decide to tip something online.

40:00 Another perspective that I am interested in is paying to get answers online. Products like this includes Quora’s new feature: Knowledge Prize.

50:00 We also look into the subscription model vs pay by each piece of content, like membership on Spotify vs buying individual song on iTunes. And we reached the conclusion for this episode: when looking at content monetization on the Internet, one should go beyond the content itself, but think about the cost of the content producer, the server, and etc. Those are what we are actually paying for on the Internet.