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Comment by sellandb | Hacker News Reader

I understand what you are trying to say. I am curious though what you recommend as a monetization strategy if you take that route? I suppose ad revenue is always the old fall back, but I would imagine that for a lot of the content out there, that is not free to produce, there needs to be some way to pay the bills.

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There's always the old standby: custom-made, one-off products.

A concert, for instance; lots of musicians make money through performance.

Depending on how crowd-pleasin' your creation is, or how well you've done at finding a crowd, there's a bit of tension possible; a husband who commissioned a Dali portrait of his wife ended up hanging it in his kennels to underscore what he thought of it.

Well if the things you need are not scarce, then it doesn't take as much money to "pay the bills."

Let me know when you have a strategy to make housing into a post-scarcity good like software.

Using the digital content as basically a loss leader for things that can't be distributed digitally, namely live performances and merch that you'd sell at those live performances.

It's artists also have a little success with digital 'busking' - where you intentionally deliver high quality content for free, along with a message that asks people to toss a few bucks your way if they think you're worth it.

The best written one I've ever seen was Benn Jordan's "Hello Downloader", which is included in all of his self-released torrents: http://www.alphabasic.com/Please_read.html

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