I think it’ll take a few years for regular folks to figure out ways to measure the value of their content and for many to even understand the value of what they give away to many sites for free.

User content contributions to  Facebook,  travel sites, myspace, Google, Yahoo, and many many more make up what I think is an increasing share of the total value of all web info.   When people understand this it may – it certainly should – change the internet landscape and hopefully shift more control from big companies to regular users.    It also may increasingly commercialize the landscape, which is probably not a good thing though the world has never seen a very democratic and global commercialized landscape controlled by any old mom or pop who sticks up a site.   It’ll be interesting to say the least.

To one extent this has already begun with Google adsense allowing publishers to share in revenues, but note that Google itself is built on the backbone of billions of web pages they didn’t have to create.
Most of their money comes from people using Google to search *other peoples stuff*.    When will Yahoo or Microsoft wake up to the fact that people will abandon Google search quickly for a variety of reasons including inferior quality, change in habit, inconvenience (Vista Search!?), or payment to use alternatives (cha-ching!).   Seems to me that Ask is doing a better job of changing habits than Yahoo or MSN though I haven’t checked the market share numbers to see if ASK’s massive ad campaign is working.

The current thinking by most Web 2.0 sites is that if you create a high traffic community site you’ve got it made, and that has certainly been true with Myspace, Facebook, Flickr, and many more.   However users may soon start to realize that the content is more valuable than the  consolidation of that content.

You might suggest that Adsense recognizes this since it a pays publishers about 70% of the ad click revenue from their sites.   However this does not factor in that the collective site content around the world, indexed by Google et al, is the big money ticket.   Google shares none of the revenue they get when somebody clicks on ads presented after a search at Google even though they’d have nothing to show if, say, the collective internet world did what the news agencies are starting to do – challenge Google’s right to present their content.

John Battelle’s Federated Media understands this and is providing mechanisms to better monetize high value content.

However it’s the low brow stuff that brings the big money and I wonder how long before banners above sites will read “Webbers of the World Unite!”