“Content wants to be free” and other scary phrases seem to rear their ugly head every so often. This week, the discussion focused around whether content is becoming so easy to get and make that it is becoming worthless.

The bottled water analogy fits perfect here. Tap or drinking fountain water is free and available everywhere. Yet bottled water sales continue to soar because of:

a) Convenience – bringing a bottle of water with me means I don’t have to search around or stop to find tap water
b) Higher Quality – ok this is probably more perception than reality, but people pay for bottled water because it tastes better and is perceived to be more pure because it is from a “trusted” source. (For me, I buy it because I wonder what’s been rinsed out or cleaned out at the drinking fountain that I’m about to put my face in.)

Both of these apply directly to content. If someone has created content that saves me time because I don’t have to research and aggregate the information myself, that’s convenience and I’ll definitely buy it. If someone has created a high-quality piece of content that took a great deal of work to put together, it’s going to be higher in quality than something someone put together for free – and I’m likely to buy it.

Yes, more and more content will be available for free, but it means a lot of garbage will be available as well. The more researched and more work put into a piece of content, the more value it has to the customer and the more likely they are to open their wallets for it – that will never change.

All this is to say, don’t shy away from creating content you can charge for just because you hear “digital content has no value.” Anyone who says so likely wouldn’t pay for anything anyway. Concentrate on the audience that wants convenience or wants higher quality and you can always make money with content.

Videos of kids breaking their arms on skateboards on YouTube = free

Video series on step-by-step methods to raise capital for a business from a 25-year VC exec: $

For alternative (read: wrong) views: see here and here.

You know who you are. Always talking about how content should “free”, “open” and “transparent.” Conversations should be available anywhere, with everyone having equal ability to comment, discuss and feel valued. Anything behind a “walled garden” that can’t be re-mixed, mashed-up and re-purposed should be frowned upon – even ignored. Copyright? Schmopyright- I use the most liberal version of Creative Commons because I want people to join my campfire discussion and anything that limits that can’t be good….right?

Wait a minute – a site called Shyfter is grabbing my feed and allowing people to comment on my post outside my blog? You mean, a discussion I started could actually fizzle on my blog, but take off somewhere else? They can’t do that! My Creative Commons license says they….wait a minute. They give attribution and there aren’t ads around the content so they aren’t using it for commercial purposes. Hey, that’s not fair!

So I guess all the talk about open, free and transparent is great – until someone takes content of yours and uses it to build their site.

You can’t have it both ways, folks. If you really believe in all that open, free and transparent baloney, don’t whine when your content is taken and a discussion about it is had elsewhere.

This post, like everything else on this blog: Copyright © 2008 TNC New Media. All rights reserved. And proud of it.

I’ve been thinking about this subject all week and it’s starting to bother me.

In the “old days” anyone who was famous in the media had the big bucks that naturally accompanied that fame. But these days, there seems to be a whole lot of folks that are “Internet famous” because of blogging, podcasting, Twitter, flickr, etc. and yet need to ask their audience for donations in order to buy a better microphone. It’s a bizarre and ironic result of the ability for anyone and everyone to start producing content and gather an audience.

Sure, there’s a great deal of talk about how one can leverage fame into fortune with speaking gigs, book deals, TV appearances and jobs with Fortune 500 companies. But how many people have actually turned their fame into real dollars? Not many, simply because great content creators often aren’t always great marketers. You can say that great content will open doors all by itself, but in reality it just doesn’t work that way.

Twitter, blogs, podcasts and new media in general have created a wave of “famous” people – people with a “wealth” of attention and inbound links, but can’t pay their bills at the end of the month. Worse yet, some seem to think that if you do find a way to make your living successfuly, you’ve “sold out” and are no longer true to your audience. That’s a shame and it needs to change.

The “link” and “attention” may be the currency of the Internet, but until someone can show me how to pay my mortgage by linking to my bank once a month, that just doesn’t fly with me.

I hope it’s one of the many conversations we can all have at the New Media Expo this August. Feel free to comment here to get the conversation started.