Apparently me and Phil Wainewright shared the same thoughts around the need for a revenue sharing infrastructure for the long-tail. My post is here and his here.

But what I neglected to say in that post is that the techniques for doing this are still at a primitive and elementary level because so little experience and best practice has been built up. Nobody knows for sure how to measure and price on-demand functionality, and even when that has been resolved, there still needs to be an infrastructure for presenting the bills, collecting payment, and distributing the proceeds. This is the biggest headache facing the pioneers of Web 3.0 and it’s not going to get resolved overnight. I suspect it’s a topic I’ll have to carry on asking awkward questions about throughout 2006.

I’ve gotten a couple emails regarding my post and I’ve been struggling with how to reply given that I am an insider at a company that does have a vested interest in the space (eBay-Paypal). (please accept my apology) But given that Phill already brought up many of the issues, I think I can share a little more thoughts. I believe a lot of the lessons of how a startup could own this space could be learned through how paypal built a multi-billion $ business ON TOP of the existing ACH and CC infrastructure. That given the right value proposition, the right functionalities, the right barrier to entries, and right integration with the required payment and metering pieces, a startup could very much become Paypal’s strategy into the space rather than competing with it.