The Tragedy of the Digital Commons
I’ve been working on my startup, Fair Tread, for over a year now, having left the camaraderie (and safety) that goes with being the CTO at Fast Company to embark on a mission to fix what I saw as the elephants in the room ¹:
- every digital creator ultimately has to answer to an advertiser should they want to create as a profession;
- no one likes digital ads;
- ad blocking is easy and makes sense for people that don’t like ads. (see #2)
With mission in mind, I gathered some like-minded co-founders and we armed ourselves with the one technique that seemed like it would have a chance to avert a modern day tragedy of the commons: make Users more powerful by making them Customers. Said another way: let’s find a way to let users pay for content (if they want to).
The tragedy of the Digital Commons
If you’re not familiar with the Tragedy of the Commons the Wikipedia says:
[it is] a situation where individuals acting independently and rationally according to their own self-interest behave contrary to the best interests of the whole by depleting some common resource.
Back in the day when the Victorian economist William Forster Lloyd was first describing the situation, the “commons” were physical areas of common land, on which herdsmen raised cattle. In Lloyd’s scenario, individual herdsmen are motivated to add more cattle to their shared pasture, eventually leading to the ruin of the land for all.
Our twenty-five year experiment with websites and their corresponding digital economies has created a modern day Digital Commons. This is incredible — and unimaginable that we could ever declare the experiment a failure. In the Digital Commons, it’s taken for granted that content is freely available (accessible), regardless of subject or the motivation for placing it online, and that we have a right (duty?) to share it. By placing something “online” the creator expects it to be effortlessly consumed and duplicated without the incremental costs associated with past media. It’s how the world works.
Our business models need modernizing to include Us
My worry (and here I’m not alone, nor is this news) is that the business models for putting content online are the weak link in the sustainability of the Digital Commons. While Fair Tread is a technology company our products attempt to take their major design cues from existing social media norms (such as RTs, h/t, etc); our products codify these norms to the benefit of the Commons. Said another way, our code routes money from User to Us — that is, all Users.
Parceling up existing sites with paywalls, meters, and other digital fences (in the form of giant platform sites like Facebook, etc.) seems inevitable if the largest boycott in history continues to gain sympathizers without the relief or alternatives.
Ads are not the problem in the same way that the problem for Lloyd was not the cow. In our current predicament, it’s clear that they shouldn’t be the only solution. A heterogeneous digital economy should include a mix of advertising, direct consumer support, broad consumer support, and all the others listed in Fred Wilson’s Web and Mobile Revenue Models (final)?
A card catalog or access to the stacks
It’s not as if publishers don’t realize the problem or even want to fix it. It’s just that the solutions at hand to keep content producers financially relevant solve publisher problems at the expense of the Digital Common. If taken to its current conclusion we may end up with a situation where you can freely access any information you want, but only be given a snippet view unless you pay some arbitrary monthly fee that a particular site thinks it needs to survive. It’s as if we would convert the accessible web into a giant card catalog instead of being able to browse and peak at the books from within the stacks at will.
Join Us
We’ve been building our products for the past year, and are just starting to emerge from that self-inflicted sequestration, so expect more posts from me going forward as I change roles from developer to CEO. I’d love to hear what you think. Follow @FairTread on Twitter, or join our public Slack Room. I’d love to hear from you.
[1] It should be underscored that this is not unique to Fast Company, that just happens to be the last place I worked.
