I've seen several examples lately of people calling for shutting the doors on ad revenue in one way or the other.

The two most recent, that prompted me to put up this branch.

The Dish - (dailydish.typepad.com)

Bill Maher - (nytimes.com)

Specifically in the publication space, I'm interested to hear what others consider viable alternatives to advertising.

Membership fees are a given and so we'll put it down on the list, but I'd like to strike up a more in depth dialogue regarding something beyond just paid memberships, because they have the terrible side effect of pay walls that create a more closed web that is hard to easily share.

When you think about earning money in a web-based environment, there are very limited ways to do that still at this point. One of the major factors is advertising and I truly don't believe there is a way to get past it. However, there are more respectable ways of doing it than what is happening, of course.

No doubt, pay walls suck. But you can do the membership fee without creating such an environment. Having the consumer of your product pay a yearly fee for features such as HD content, no advertisements and bonus content not available to free members is something that I support.

Other ways of making money include selling merchandise or using referrals to commerce sites. Either way, though, you see the limitations involved.

Thanks for taking your 750 to touch on that a bit more than I was able to.

However, I still drift back to,

"Let's be realistic" -- Said no one who did anything innovative EVER.

Perhaps, I'm just a hopeless romantic, but I feel the internet is still very young as a paid content conduit in a lot of ways. There hasn't been innovation in how you make revenue from content on the whole scale in a very long time.

Really what I'm curious about is the fringe efforts to try something new. (daringfireball.net) However, we all know that didn't work well, but it was a new angle.

..a CONTENT <-> REVENUE relationship, that fits these rough guidelines:

* Future Friendly
* Open & Shareable
* Respectful
* Of Quality
* (what else should be here?

Right now most attempts come down to a membership model in some way, however Ben Brooks of The Brooks Review (brooksreview.net) publishes articles right away for members of the site, but keeps the whole site free for readers who do not want to pay at all, but those only can read the articles seven days later. Full RSS Feeds remain, what is great. He tries to write articles that are interesting, even after seven days have passed. Sharing articles for members is still possible, with links from social networks you can read all articles at any time, not dependent on if you are a member or not.

NSFW Corp (nsfwcorp.com) has pay-wall for some articles, which falls for 24 hours with a link the author is able to share with the world.

@Arne

I agree that the model you've described is unique and from the sounds of things, works with the content that Ben is making, however in the ever-fast-moving world of the Internet as it is today, that isn't as easy to do for most.

If you are a creator of content not related to time-sensitive material, having a wall up where members can read it or see it a day or whatever early is acceptable. I've seen that done on the release of episodes from the popular web-series Red vs. Blue where the episode is released hours earlier for "Sponsors" of the site. I've always found this acceptable.

I still don't understand how news sites get away with pay walls as it just makes me not want to visit their site, but that's just my personal opinion.

@Nick

Agreed. For Podcasts I believe something like this is much easier to do. A german podcast called "Bits und So" lets members listen to the podcast live and also to the pre and after show. For the rest the main episode is available as soon as it got uploaded to the servers, the pre and after show never. That is a model that does not hurt them or the listeners and is in this regard great.

@Arne,

I'm intrigued by the time delay. Essentially people or paying for impatience. The time delay on News articles essentially goes away once the article is already spread throughout public knowledge so one could argue, is a day old News article still worth much?

Something I've considered that have yet to see (correct me if I'm wrong), is the possibility of gaining some small part of revenue from paid comments. To comment you have to pay a small fee, a dollar, perhaps a yearly fee of some sort?

@Stephen

Paid comments are already a thing on Venus Patrol (venuspatrol.com) for example and actually is, as I believe, a bad decision. All you do is limit discussion to those who pay, and that really excludes some important voices and also, you need a lot of readers that somebody even will comment ever. If you sell the membership-thing as the way to comment, it really isn't something appealing to most. Comments are something skipped by most and you do not encourage discussion by limiting it if you are not at the size of the NY Times or similar. (Correct me if there are some doing so and are successful). You may want to read Fred Wilson's piece about excluding voices on the web too: avc.com

@Arne,

You make a valid point, and in many cases having comments at all is arguably a bad idea as twitter and branch are places better suited to have a dialogue about something.

Interesting read, that link. I remember a similar sentiment shared by Rob Morris a few years back on building fences around people. digitalmash.com

I do think that comments are a valid bit of content, but that depends on where they live and how they are curated (which is a topic for probably several branches).

So, I say paid comments is NOT a viable alternative.

So then, any other suggestions folks?

@Nick mentioned ancillary content for those who pay. I'd like to see someone's take on this a bit further as it might have promise.