There was a great billboard that the agency I used to work for in Sydney several years ago had created for the launch of Virgin Mobile in Australia. At the time, the other telcos were starting to charge for every feature, so the billboard promoted Virgin's new offering with the declaration - "Voicemail is like sex, you shouldn't have to pay for it." Today, that joke/truth could be equally applied to how people feel about online content. In the age of peer to peer music sharing and ease of cutting and pasting, getting people to actually pay for content is a tough challenge.
There are, however, three models that I've seen used on various sites that do work. To be clear, I'm not talking about monetizing content. There are lots of ways to fund content creation through selling advertising or capturing profile data for a sales cycle. This post is about getting some to pay directly for content that you're creating. In fact, having this arrangement means that you can be more selective about the advertising you accept, or choose to forego it altogether. So here they are:
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