The Key To Getting People To Pay For Content? Management.

Now here’s an interesting theory I got from the folks out at CNet–it’s not that people won’t pay for music and suchlike on the internet, but that’s not what they REALLY want to pay for.  What they WILL pay for is MANAGED content.

Organization, ladies and gentlemen!  Organization is apparently the magic key to getting people to pay for content, and man, doesn’t that ever make sense?

If you, like me, spend a lot of time on YouTube, you’ll know full well that it’s a mess in there.  Searching for any one particular search term can generate thousands of results, and some of them may be complete jokes.  I mean that literally–I don’t know how many times I’ve been rickrolled trying to catch a new movie trailer.

So if someone were to offer me a twenty dollar add on that would filter out the rickrolls and the practical jokes and everything else and actually GET ME WHAT I WANT, then I might well pay for that.

YouTube is a great example of the need for management–twenty hours of video show up on YouTube every minute.  Trying to sift through it manually takes a lot of time and patience.  But with a high-powered search tool, possibly only available by subscription, plenty of people might take advantage.  It’s not the content you’ve got to get people to pay for–it’s the organization.