Just a thought as I was reading a NYT Magazine article on Rick Rubin: The newspaper industry is at a crossroads just like the music industry- the traditional model is broken and a new model around blogs/feeds/personalized news is developing. Problem is that some of those new “news” outlets rely on being able to reference/refer to article from traditional media. Those articles are, more often that not, in pay-walled gardens. How can bloggers that need access to primary source material play nice with primary source publishers that need revenue for the goods they are producing?
I don’t think the AdWords ad model works here (at least all the time) since the primary source material may not be somthing suitable for AdWords targeting (think political commentary). If it was a home improvement article, AdWords based referal revenue might work, but a good chunk of content won’t. That got me thinking about article sponsorship. Would a company/group be willing to pony up money to allow open access coming from a blog to a pay-walled garden article in return for advertising/promotion/exposure? The blogger still sells ad space on his site using AdWords, etc.. but the paper brands the article with specific sponsor advertising. The sponsored advertising is only used when accessed via that blog. Users can still “pay per view” the article from the pay-walled garden and see no ad sponsorship or perhaps the entire article is sponsored and open for public view as long as the sponsor puts up the cash.
Either way the blogger gets access to the primary source material, the sponsor gets their name associated with the article and the paper makes more money on a good story.
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