I posted a long reply several days ago and I can’t for the life of me work out why it’s not here. Damn!

I think we can liken this to the offline world. Some business work on a low margin, high volume model. So yes, as you state, people will still be incentivised to get high page views. But if advertisers, get a better return elsewhere, this will change the dynamics. You’ve got to consider the advertisers want to get a better return on investment - it’s not charity for them. If some blog gets high traffic, because of Digg lets say, the advertisers pays for the traffic but because of the nature of Digg’s audience, it’s hard to monetise as they don’t typically stay around.

Think of an expensive antique store, where there are a select few customers. The owner maintains a relationship with his customers, and he ensures return business. He targets the high value customers, and looking after them means he gets a high value of business. He could opt for the high volume strategy as well, but then he will burn himself out…which ties back to my argument above which is not sustainable.

So how does that encourage journalistic quality? If you want to make $100,000 - you can either go for the 100,000 uniques at $1 each; or the 1,000 uniques are $100 each time. One-thousand uniques are a lot easier, but also require better focus to satisfy them. Give them the attention they need, and you are just a well off as a high volume strategy - without the burnout. It’s time the “new” online content industry starting adopting the customer profitability models used in the “old” world.

I’ll talk about ‘pureprofile’ and then show how I think VRM could work for content providers.

‘pureprofile’ is a website where consumers sign up, fill in a detailed profile of their demographic information, and are rewarded for looking at advertisements. The only advertisements that they see are ones targeted at the data in their profile.

Advertisers therefore only pay for the opportunity to reach a targeted population, rather than scattering pamphlets across the entire Internet.

Consumers on ‘pureprofile’ earn “points” or “credits”, which they can redeem for cash or selected goods. The website now claims that consumers are also shown blogs, videos and other content based on their profile information; however I’ve not seen that myself.

It’s not satisfactory VRM because the consumer has no ownership of the data. The operators of ‘pureprofile’ control the information, and keep the profits from selling its value to advertisers.

I imagine that VRM could be implemented, to remunerate content providers, in the following way. Internet visitors would need to participate in VRM before being allowed to access certain content. Then the content provider’s website could use the VRM information about the visitor to show relevant ads. The ads could be drawn from a big pool of paying advertisers, as with Google Adsense and most ad networks.

So then, the content provider is remunerated for quality page views, not just page views.

Wait, how does that encourage journalistic quality? Such a system would still be an incentive to get a large volume of page views.

Revenue for content providers will still be based on getting a large number of visitors. The only difference is that the advertisers will know for sure whether or not the visitors are in a valuable demographic.