Nick Carr on the Youtube Star: Required Reading

By Jeff and Alan ...

On Friday Youtube started paying some of the most popular of its videographers. Om Malik, I believe, broke the story. The ever incisive Nicholas Carr of Rough Type, muses over the move to reward the "You Tube elite." This move constitutes somewhat of vindication for Carr, who entered into a highly publicized wager with the Yale Law professor Yochai Benkler last summer over whether social production (aka crowdsourcing) could survive without being eventually sullied by the emergence of a system of monetary rewards.

I've always found the debate a bit beside the point. I call both Wikipedia (which relies on non-monetary rewards) and a model like iStockPhoto (which relies on a combination of monetary and non-monetary compensation) to constitute a fundamentally new mode of production. I call it ... Oh, you know what I call it, don't you. Regardless, Youtube's move is a significant (and overdue) development in the maturation of the crowdsourcing model, and Carr's post provides much food for thought. And if you haven't read the original post by Carr that spawned the wager, it's here. Benkler's reply is here. Oh, and because I'll use any opportunity I can to plug Benkler's book, if you haven't read his The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, go buy it here, now.