I continue to believe that there are a large group of vocal individuals out there in the blogosphere that believe that any form of making money online is a near-sacrilege upon the high altar of what the web was “really supposed to be about”.
First, they flipped out over the first banner ad.
Then, they flipped out over the first text ads.
They continued to go nutty over larger ad sizes, such as the skyscraper and the medium/large rectangles.
Then came blogs. Blogs were pure and innocent. Some even had halos.
Then Jason Calacanis came along with Nick Denton around the same time and began paying bloggers.
“We’re all going to hell!”, some said…
Now the blogosphere freaks out yet again when Weblogs, Inc. CEO Jason Calacanis offers to pay the top content contributors to Digg / Reddit / Flickr / Newsvine $1,000 monthly for submitting content to the new Netscape.
Based on the reaction from the blogosphere yesterday, I would say that Jason might have been better perceived if he had taken a few babies out in the middle of the street and pumped bullets into them.
And once again, the mainstream blogosphere is dead wrong on this issue.
Jason has managed, if it works, to provide income to some of the better content contributors out there and use their knack for finding the top stories to drive traffic and repeat visits to Netscape. And I believe his idea will pay off in the long run.
Others will continue to knash their teeth and scream about the outrage – some even go as far as say that this is a huge red flag at netscape.
I think they’re all wrong – and this will drive contributions and traffic at Netscape. It’s not a sign of desperation, it’s a sign of a savvy marketing leader making a move to trump his competition.
