How do you feel about someone else making money off your content? Ryan 299 comments Latest by Felix ade

Anil makes an interesting observation regarding Flickr, Yahoo, and your content. He uses Flickr and Yahoo as examples, but of course this relates to any community-based service build with user-generated content and supported by advertisers.

But interestingness in Flickr doesn’t pay. At least not yet. Non-pro users are seeing ads around my photos, but Yahoo’s not sharing the wealth with me, even though I’ve created a draw. Flickr’s plenty open, they’re doing the right thing by any measure of the web as we saw it a year ago, or two years ago. Today, though, openness around value exchange is as important as openness around data exchange.

The shift that is going on is pretty radical, actually. The way it used to work was this: You took a photo, someone used it (to make whatever they’re doing better), and you got paid for it. They paid you for your talent. Now, hundreds of thousands of people are taking photos, uploading them to a site like Flickr, making Flickr better, and Yahoo is reaping the financial rewards, not the photographers. That’s a pretty big shift. Yahoo is making money off the backs of the collective camera.

Maybe this is all OK. Maybe people don’t care. But I have a feeling that will change once the smoke from this new experiment in collective media clears.

I wonder when the public will demand that Yahoo shares a portion of the revenues generated from ads on people’s photos . I guess you could say that they are sharing by proving the service for free. I buy that point, but there will come a time when the scale is going to tip big time in Yahoo’s favor. They’ll be giving you some storage and a place to put your photos (and discover others) and in return Yahoo will generate millions and millions of revenue on those ads.

Thoughts?