Couple of interesting things happened this week.

According to some reports, Facebook is considering paying some users for content. About a year ago Facebook started noticing that people are sharing less original content on the social network. The decline is not precipitous but has to be significant enough for Facebook to consider such a move. Blogging platform Medium reportedly is also paying users for highly consumed pieces. Many news websites also pay some contributing authors for popular articles/pieces. Of course Youtube has offered revenue share for original popular videos for many years now.

Simon Rothman, a VC at Greylock, wrote an article explaining Why Uber Won. The upshot of his piece being that Uber took advantage of cheap capital to “buy” it’s way into creating a marketplace. Interesting. Also, not very different from buying your way into creating a content marketplace comprised of content creators and content readers.

Dave Winer, creator of RSS and an internet blogging pioneer, released 1999.io, a blogging platform that hopes to help ‘let thousands open web servers bloom’. This post is actually written on 1999.io server hosted by Dave, but I could also run my own 1999.io server on AWS or any internet connected compute environment. I’m hoping Dave would release a version soon that makes deploying my own 1999.io on AWS as simple as installing app on my smart phone.

Looking at these three things, I’m wondering if we finally are entering the age of micro-content syndication network. Walled gardens like Youtube, Facebook and Medium do a great job of giving audience to our written word or beautiful pictures, interesting video etc. but it’s not a great bargain for content owners or audiences who contribute in time.

I imagine a model in which we can pull the audience out of these walled gardens and into the Bazaar of Open Web, and then syndicate popular content back to these walled gardens - perhaps for an auctioned price.

How does it work ?

Step 1: I create content on an open web server like 1999.io where I fully control and own my data

Step 2: I drop a link into walled gardens. Audience (direct and viral ) come to my content

Step 3: Once a particular piece crosses threshold (e.g. 10K EFR (estimated full reads)), the piece is programmatically syndicated at a price to the (buyer) social network, blogging platform or any ad-monetized web property.