That, really is all I can say without sounding redundant.

In the financial industry whether it’s WSJ, FT or industry research the end user is used to having to pay for content. The same may be true for the legal profession as they’re used to paying for LexisNexis and court documents from PACER.

So getting users to pay for content when they’re not used to having to do that is where the uphill battle is and why these sudden paywalls have been so unsuccessful. Imagine what would happen if Facebook started requiring a $10 subscription or Gmail charged $0.01 per email. We’re used to free. So now we have to find a way to reintroduce fees.

In finance, in particular, depending on where you work, the WSJ (US) or FT (int’l) is required reading. So yes, good content, but very often paid for by your employer. The ‘paid for’ part is key.

Consumer reports sells their content like many software as a service companies do today, that is, they give away lots of free content, but subscribers get the premium data (which they do a good job of promoting with “cr” buttons).

It’s also not expensive, and they do a surprisingly good job of creating community.

I completely agree with your assessment, but thought worth adding that packaging and knowing your audience is a key to success.

The modern digital world should be an opportunity for more of the reward to go directly to those that create stuff than has happened in the past. The music industry as an example. My worry is that there is a determined effort to bring the old business models into the digital world. The models where the creator is as much a source of profit as the user and it is the shareholders and owners who get the majority of any profit. Is it going to be ‘land grab’ time where areas get fenced off so the cattle barons can get rich off the meat?

Is there any data on how much reward creators get from the buy me a beer or coffee contribution options? Or even the shareware authors who publish software? Will we as consumers throw a big enough coin in the hat? I do in the real world if there’s a good busker. Why not in the digital?

The potential audience per article could be a thousand. Up to hundreds of thousands if it’s exceptional. Fifty cents a view?

Come on developers, we need a one click penny in a hat mechanism to revolutionise digital trade.

The down side is we’ll be tracked even more than we already are. Sigh.

Syndication’s a fascinating world, for sure. I’ll be very interested to see how it plays out for organizations that aren’t media companies — and for media companies who must compete against high-quality free content.

Education and events can be good sources of revenue, but seem more like spinoffs than part of a content model, which is why I didn’t get into examples like An Event Apart (which was built on ALA and book deals). So much of that is about establishing credibility through content, and I think that’s all part of the “marketing” category.

In any case, there are indeed a lot of experiments flying around. I’m mostly just surprised by how many of them are, at the core, only slight variations on the models we’ve already seen in print and broadcast. I’m not seeing much real innovation — but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

We are living through a flurry of such experiments right now (leaping to mind are the Guardian Club and a more narrow, fussy Times equivalent: http://www.niemanlab.org/2009/08/newspapers-find-a-new-way-to-monetize-their-journalists/ ). Once you start looking, you realize they are everywhere. I’m indexing them here: http://predicate-llc.com/category/blog-content-topic/business-strategy/

But licensing is the biggest of all, and the ways in which content gets packaged and syndicated (branded editorial, sure, but data as well) is expanding rapidly. There are those who argue that packaging trumps content (as if they were truly separable). In the near future, I see CSes routinely auditing for the inbound and outbound portability of content for other customers and platforms. It’s a natural extension of the way we plan for multiple delivery mechanisms like mobile today. All of which will shine a bright light on those, like our colleague Paul Ford, expert at content modeling.