I have written a lot about the challenges of charging for content as digital content production and distribution has skyrocketed. The fundamental problem from here on out is that the supply of content far outstrips the demand which means that at the margin the price for content will be zero. That doesn’t mean people won’t pay for content at all, for instance, blockbuster movies or books by well established authors can likely continue to be sold for a price. But what about emerging authors?
This is exactly where our portfolio company Wattpad is conducting an interesting experiment. Wattpad is a community of readers and writers. The stories are free to read because Wattpad is full of young writers who are just getting going (some notable writers notwithstanding). Put differently much of the content on Wattpad is exactly the kind of content that one cannot charge for without severely limiting its audience. What about once a writer has built an audience on Wattpad? This is where the idea of fan funding comes in. Wattpad is working with a few authors for now to let them tap into their fans to help raise money in a Kickstarter like model.
For the time being this is a limited experiment to see what kind of projects writers want to raise money for and how the fans will respond. You can read more about it on Wattpad’s fan funding page, on their blog and on co-founder Allen Lau’s blog. I am excited to see where this will go as it represents a potentially much better mechanism for supporting long tail content creation and consumption than simply trying to charge a price.
