Back in July 2006 Jason Calacanis offered to pay top posters, to the social bookmarking sites like Delicious and Digg, to begin posting to Netscape instead.
At the time the move sparked a lot of interest in the internet community and one particular blo…

Because they couldn’t pay that little.

A good post probably takes me two hours or more to write and the *ability* to write it comes from many years of experience and knowledge gathering. So if I could do that four times a day every day of the month I’d earn a paltry $1,200.00 or so? Yeah, show me where I can sign up: I just love being abused!

But.. unless I’m misunderstanding this totally, this is just payment for “what you are doing already”. If that’s what it is, it’s a great gesture.

But really, the people who SHOULD be paying the content producers are the ISP’s: it’s our content that causes the demand that attracts their customers.

Think about it: here I am pulling in around 6,000 uniques per day. Pretend they were all Verizon customers or all Comcast customers: those ISP’s make $30 or $40 a month from each of those people and they wouldn’t have switched from dialup if it were not for all the content sites. Now of course my share of that wouldn’t be a lot: presumably those 6,000 people visit a few other sites daily also, but let’s just play with some numbers:

Pretend the “payout” share is 10% of the daily value, or roughly 10 cents per visit. How many sites do we share that between? Who knows – let’s grab 50 as a rough number. So 6,000 time 10 cents divided by 50 is $12.00 per day.. feel free to substitute any numbers you like, of course.

Of course they wouldn’t see it that way :-)

Also, this will create a big internet buzz complete with controversy, which will give them a lot of free advertising.

Lastly, since Digg is now a competitor, raiding their best submitters makes obvious business sense.

Personally, I think Netscape (in General) sucks and they’re not going to pose any serious social bookmarking competition to Digg, or even De.licio.us.