PaidContent.org has taken its first investment, reports BuzzMachine. The sum was said to be ‘less than $1m’ according the WSJ and Rafat says he will make more than $1m in ads this year. Investor Alan Patricof says:
“To start a magazine today would cost a minimum of $15 million to $25 million, and you have to spend through three or four years of losses,” Mr. Patricof said. With blogs, “the economics are a lot better.”
Hi Jim, a paid-for contet model I like is Amazon’s Mechanical Turk where you can ask the the Mechanical Turk ‘workforce’ to perform tasks that computers have trouble doing in return for small payments.
Producers of the English Standard Version Bible recently wanted an electronic database that would identify all 5,500 direct quotes in the Bible by speaker. they uploaded all the quotes to the Amazon service and agreed to pay two cents a quote. the result was a unique Bible database for a cost of about $75. Now that’s what I call harnessing collective intelligence!
Andrew
http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2006/06/mechanical_turk.html