To be honest, I don’t think it’s achievable…yet. The number one reason is that it requires a huge change in thinking, something that most people aren’t ready to embrace yet. In effect, a paradigm shift to occur. What’s the shift? Basically instead of a payment (take) economic approach, you instead shift to a reward (give) economic approach. Why is this necessary for the Web? Because it helps to maintain open and accessible information that can be viewed by anyone on the Web (i.e. open shared network), something that isn’t possible with a gated payment approach.

In effect, what’s happening is that instead of paying someone in advance for their content or recommendations (i.e. they take your money first), you instead reward them for their recognized contributions already received (i.e. you give them money afterwards). At no time is money being forced to change hands here. It’s all freely given. Think of it kind of like an investment (i.e. VC), in that your reward is in the hopes that they will use it to continue creating great content.

I see the two steps to achieving this.

1) Achieving a tipping point.
2) Creating an easy system to manage the flow of money.

I honestly believe achieving the tipping point is the more difficult of the two. You could get some of the more influential bloggers to spread the awareness of the idea which hopefully in turn will get others to get involved themselves (i.e. I’m setting aside $20/month to give between a handful of people that I value their content as an investment and reward for their ongoing efforts). However again, I can’t see this happening. People are ingrained to think that they shouldn’t have to pay for something unless they absolutely have to do so, no matter how great it is.

Creating a system to manage this new flow of money (in reverse though to normal commerce) is the easier of the two. I mean I could theoretically do this manually right now via my traffic stats. Who’s recommending / referring me the most? These three people are. Ok, I’ll give them a percentage of my profits what I think is fair. Obviously having a system that handles this for you would be much easier. Ok, Jeff at Buzzmachine is driving a lot of traffic to me. I’m going to give him 5% of my monthy contributions with a maximum cap of $1000. After that, the system takes care of everything. Yet at any time, you can change the parameters of this “flow” of money from you, however you like.

So to summarize, I only see one way to invest / inject money into the system / network and that money comes from us alone. Once injected though, it just needs to be kept flowing / moving for it to work. In effect, the site’s that receive the most contributions should be the site’s that are actively contributing the most (to bring awareness to other great content and to help them achieve sustainability as well). The end result is that everyone becomes involved in the sustainability of each other. In effect, we collaborate within the commons to collectively ensure the sustainability of each other as best we can.

Oh one last thing. I’m not against capitalism (if you’re wondering). I actually believe everyone should be truly rewarded for what they create. The thing to realize is that this economic approach is only doable on the Web. You can’t walk into a grocery store, grab a bunch of groceries and say I’ll give you a reward later if I like it. Just doesn’t work that way, as we all know. Yet therein lies the problem. The only way to be able to support ourselves offline in the real world via our online work is by taking our offline money and injecting it into the online world somehow. That’s the only way to start generating this shift, so that eventually once the “snowball” (and money) does starts rolling in the right direction, more and more people’s incomes will come from the Web.

I would agree that the network is fast becoming the dominant metaphor for understanding media. However, if you look at the underlying motivations of why consumers are participating through blogs and social communities - it is fairly clear that the most salient feature of networks today is discovery not distribution.

Users join networks in order to get found, be noticed, earn publicity and steal attention for whatever they create or stand for. The difficult thing for traditional media companies in this scenario is that their content is now just one of many things vying for attention from audiences, including audience members themselves.

Interestingly - there is a good example of the shared revenue business model for aggregators that you mention. Adult site operators and affiliate marketers have long worked out that it is better to link to competitive content and earn a percentage of that downstream revenue, than aggregate and sell just your own material.

I think many traditional media companies have coasted on the aggregation business model for some time - and this will be one of the tougher challenges for them as audiences discover that so called exclusive content that could once be locked down by medium or region - is now available everywhere on multiple platforms.

It must be the day for network media theories. I posted a reply to some similar comments by Charlene Li at Forrester today as well here