In an opinion piece in The Huffington Post on July 28, Sam Shrauger, Vice President of Global Product Strategy for PayPal, said that the time has come for consumers to change their minds about the value of digital content. The reason for the change, he wrote, is direct monetization of that content.
Online payment models can create very efficient distribution and content consumption models, according to Shrauger. "Ubiquity has actually created more opportunity than threat for creating engaging experiences that can be monetized as effectively, if not more so, than via typical distribution models," he wrote. “Prior to the Internet's emergence, literally every content value chain was characterized by high barriers to entry and the need for massive scale in both the creation of content and its distribution.”
That is changing fast, Shrauger noted. “Now, the shift to digital production and ubiquitous digital distribution are allowing content providers to not only much more easily and cost-effectively distribute on the global scale, but also to have the liberty to unbundle and repackage content in an infinite variety of ways. That allows for much better tailoring to the needs and profiles of content consumers, in turn increasing the number of ways that content can and will be monetized.”
Shrauger’s post, titled “Direct Monetization of Digital Content: Not If, But How,” has given rise to an online conversation at The Huffington Post site, and is available here.