The paid user generated content pot continues to stir…
The poop-swinging battle that started when Weblogs, Inc. CEO Jason Calacanis offered to pay top users from Digg, 
Reddit, Newsvine sites to submit stories to Netscape continues – with Jason announcing who he’s hired so far, Dave Winer ranting about advertising on blogs, Digg profiles being sold on eBay, and others still mad that the original banner ads ever came about.
First, Calacanis announces who he has hired so far:
The word is getting out about the first 10 Netscape Navigators (people who took “the offer” to become paid bookmarkers). You can see their photos on the right hand column at www.netscape.com.
Here are the basic details, we hired:
1. Three of the top 12 DIGG users
2. The #1 user on Newsvine.
3. The #1 user on Reddit
4. We hired a bunch of folks from Weblogs, Inc. (since we know and love them :-)
Then Winer goes on yet another rant about advertising:
Yes, I have put ads on some of my sites, but never on Scripting News. I didn’t want to interfere with my message by selling rides to hitch-hikers. Frankly they weren’t offering enough money to make it worthwhile to me. In order to get me to share the space with them, they’d have to compensate me for the distraction, and for the bad vibes that comes from trying to distract the people whose attention I value most, the readers of Scripting News.
Winer has a point somewhere in there, but I think he misses it big time.
Advertising will continue to be an effective monetization method for weblogs. Like it or not, Google AdSense and sites like Text Link Ads are here to stay. They will continue to power the growth of the professional blogger.
But the real point is that there may yet be more effective ways to make money online using weblogs – and perhaps running a large stack of Google Ads isn’t the way to go about it.
