Trying to make Net money the Bob Dylan way

The opening presentations from the panellists have finished and there was an interesting array of perspectives.

Jonathan Taplin, who comes from an entertainment business and worked with Bob Dylan back in the day, suggested – naturally enough – that people look to the music industry to find a solution to what he sees at the biggest challenge for the participative web.

Namely, how to actually make money from the content that is flying across broadband links 24 hours a day. His solution: a copyright fee leveled at the ISP level, in the same way that songwriters are paid from the licence-fee pool.

The solution sounds right. But then as anyone that has been to Internet conference over the years they will recognise a familiar pattern: what appears to be a perfectly logical solution to an important issue.

History unfortunately is against this solution ever working (although not without a number of companies trying to form a business model around it and giving up two years’ later). It’s best not to forget that Google originally planned to make all of its money from selling its search tool to businesses to help them find material – the consumer front-end of it was just to help test the technology and get some awareness in the market. That business search model is tiny and Google makes all its money for the ad word business on its consumer search.

The lesson to learn is: if you ever predict the best method or system for making money, you can assured only one thing – that it won’t happen. Ginsu Yoon from Second Life argued later that it's still best to wait and see what happens - and Second Life's parent company, Linden, is, he explained, carefully watching the virtual economy that happens over their network. An economy that links to the real world (and real dollars) and currently sees $1 million a day go around the system. Michael Gill from Fairfax appears to agree. He feels certain that there is money to be made from companies providing high-quality content online, but that the "models are not yet in place".

Taplin used as an example the nine million people that viewed a video on YouTube of a US student recently being subdued with a Tazer gun by campus police in a debating forum. This was more eyeballs that most US cable stations ever manage, he pointed out.

And that’s just it: if there are nine million people looking at something in the spate of just a few days, somewhere, somehow there is money to be made from it. The frustration of businessmen is that they know this, but don’t have an agreed method for getting at it.

I don’t think we can’t expect that frustration to cease any time soon, not while the Internet continues to chop and change at such relentless speed.