Ben Gilbert: evaluation

Transcript context

…That is a blast from the past, Ben. So, you know, I look at this as I think the reason why there is a little bit of success with paywalls at publications and why I think that would be the nail in the coffin for any form of kind of like new media that involves, let’s call it social media, is that traditional media doesn’t require network effects. Let’s say Twitter for example absolutely does and as soon as people, you know, my sources are no longer on Twitter like the people that I want to be following because they decided not to subscribe, it's less valuable for me and then I don’t get that content so I’m incentivized not to subscribe and I think that there’s this like unidirectional value creation that happens from traditional media companies to their readers and there’s this massively bidirectional interconnected web on social media where if people start falling out of the ecosystem, then everybody else is less incentivized to pay also. Isn’t it possible though that some of these systems become so sticky and invaluable to our life that if you present people with the option of having to pay some sort of really small micropayment which you can then slowly move up over time, that people wouldn’t just drop out? If you had to pay a penny to stay on Facebook, would you do that?…

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