There's been quite a bit of talk lately about compensating people that share their bookmarks. Greg Yardley kicked it off:

Getting to the point - there's a million social bookmarking services out there, and I've got unused accounts on most of them, but when Pete Cashmore told me that Simpy would let you add your own AdSense links to your bookmarks page, allowing you to make 100% of the revenue, that got my attention enough to dust off the Simpy account. I love revshare with end users - it strikes back at the whole 'Web 2.0-colonialism ride the long tail of user-generated content to riches' theme by treating people as publishers, which is exactly right. So I've switched over to Simpy. I'm not expecting to get rich off it - this move is to support the principle of revenue-sharing.

Right now, I use spurl to post to del.icio.us, so I have two copies of my bookmarks. Although I haven't heard from Hjalmar Gislason in a long time, I primarily use Spurl because Hjalmar and I used to chat pretty frequently. It is a great service. But, it didn't take off (atleast in the states) like del.icio.us. With del.icio.us, I have a handful of collaborators that share bookmarks with me and vice versa.

Apparently, Simpy allows users to post to del.icio.us at the same time. And also, it is possible to bulk upload del.icio.us links. So, for me, switching cost is just the time required.

Michael Arrington questions whether paying users is a gimmick:

Is this a gimick to generate attention or is it a viable long term strategy to generate user adoption? Pete Cashmore thinks these promotions should make Yahoo (now owner of del.icio.us) take notice (see his further thoughts in the comments below). Maybe he's right. And the markets for these products are still in the very early adopter stage.

Founder of topix.net, Rich Skrenta, thinks it is not just a gimmick, but an act of desperation and detrimental to community:

On the other hand, paying individual contributors piecemeal or through lotteries or contests for content creation often seems like an act of desperation at social software companies that aren't seeing takeoff.

Someone on the board says why don't you pay everyone a dollar a post and that will prime the pump. But the motivation of working for a buck compared to participating for fun or just out of sheer interest in some web playground or social space or a straighten-things-up game are so different, that even if you successfully prime the pump, your selection method bred for the wrong sort of user base -- folks that want to get paid instead of participating because they just like participating. Once the freely-motivated subgroup that you hoped to attract catches a whiff of the off-smell of paid bait content, they stay away.

It also demeans the contribution. If I'm going to post about local city politics, or write a review of Friday's dinner out, it's borderline offensive to suggest that I'll only do so if I get a dollar. On one hand, professionals who do these things for a living get paid a lot more. But nonprofessionals aren't producing this content for the money at all. They talk politics because they want to have a local effect, or review a restaurant to warn people away after getting bad service. Not to earn a cup of coffee. It feels sorta like the street hustlers who squeegee your windshield and then ask for money, in reverse. Eww. I don't want to squeegee the web for pocket change.

I think that is a load of crapola. I definitely agree with Greg Yardley (as usual) that the people that help organize the web should be compensated for their work. I spend a lot of time reading and bookmarking content. It is primarily a selfish act because I want to know what is going-on and I want to be able to retrieve this information for later reference. But, I also think I am doing a service for others by making things a bit easier for them to find. Why shouldn't I be compensated for that?

I think this is particularly appropriate assuming that Yahoo purchased del.icio.us with the ultimate intent of improving their algorithmic search engine. When del.icio.us was acquired, I blogged about this potential. And I wasn't the only that made the same conclusion. It seems obvious to me that del.icio.us provides Yahoo the opportunity to let a bunch of unpaid people create the world's biggest directory of websites:

They now realize that the only problem with their original directory approach is that there weren't enough editors AND that it wasn't about recreating the card catalog, but about creating an infinitely expandable folksonomy powered by algorithmically searchable keywords (ie tags): The directory built from the bottom up by unpaid amateurs.

But, to Rich's point, bookmarking web pages has nothing to do with getting free coffee in exchange for writing a good review. Of course, there is some incentive for people to bookmark things to drive traffic to sites that benefit them personally, especially when search engines start to use bookmarking databases to improve or augment search results. But, this won't be a problem unique to bookmarking sites that compensate users for contributing content. It'll probably be regarded as spam. And I am sure that all of these sites will have to deal with it eventually, if they aren't already.