Charging at the top - An alternative model for monetizing digital content

Media publishers still struggle to find an economically viable model for survival and continuous production. My suggestion is a model based on the popularity of the content.

25 years after the birth of the Internet the main platform and technology for media consumption, media publishers like newspapers, music services, and cinema are still struggling to find viable economical models for survival and continuous production. Many things have been tried, and many models have failed. Bridging the gap to the future still seems like a huge challenge.

Part of the challenge lies in the binary way of thinking content as either free or paid. In a perfect scenario for each side, publishers want to get paid for all content, and consumers want all content to be free.

But what if we stop thinking in this strictly binary way, and look at another factor. Something that both sides can agree on is a fair way of deciding the value of a piece of digital content. Such a thing actually comes build-in with the internet: Popularity.

This will also allow publishers to harvest the benefits of the ability of the internet to distribute content socially and…