I was reading along this morning catching up on all of my feeds and email alerts when I came across this article by John Mello Jr. of the Ecommerce Times. It speaks to how community participants in popular social networking sites are in effect the sharecroppers of the internet.

“If you can get all your content produced for free, you can have an extremely small company that can suck huge amounts of economic value out of the marketplace,” Nicholas G. Carr, author of Does IT Matter explained. “This is very unsettling. It’s something we haven’t seen before, and I don’t think we know how it’s going to play out.”

One of the principals behind our model is the fact that we’ve noticed this as well, and we don’t think that it’s fair to say the least. Being in the trenches of the Internet and blogosphere for many years, we know the power and value of user generated content yet watched as many a large corporation has ridden on the backs of their users generating tons of revenue without rewarding the contributors that created this prosperity in the first place.

With most popular social networking sites you have this altruistic concept of connecting users around a point of interest built on a platform that places all of these cool tools into their hands. Although the emotional reward resonates to the contributors that join in droves and add value with every interaction they make within the community, the end result is that the land owners monetize the hell out of their community’s contributions yet share nothing in return. We thought there had to be a better way of doing it.

“MySpace, Facebook and many other businesses have realized that they can give away the tools of production but maintain ownership over the resulting products. One of the fundamental economic characteristics of Web 2.0 is the distribution of production into the hands of the many and the concentration of the economic rewards into the hands of the few.

“It’s a sharecropping system, but the sharecroppers are generally happy because their interest lies in self-expression or socializing, not in making money, and, besides, the economic value of each of their individual contributions is trivial. It’s only by aggregating those contributions on a massive scale — on a Web scale — that the business becomes lucrative.”

We’ve designed a platform that doesn’t just allow you to connect, collaborate, and contribute in unique ways that you’ll enjoy, we’ve designed a system that does all this while sharing the revenue those efforts generate. It’s not just about the money since the platform will be as socially rewarding as any other community site, but if money is being generated why shouldn’t you share in that reward?

“Contributors don’t feel exploited because their economic contribution isn’t all that meaningful economically,” he added, “but when you look at the entire population of contributors, it seems like a form of economic exploitation.”

We couldn’t agree more, and this is why SharedReviews is being created for you; to show you a different model that allows you a choice on where you spend your time in a fashion where you won’t be taken advantage of. The key isn’t sharing revenue on your personal contributions alone since that won’t be where the real reward is, but instead rewarding you for the community participation that you give away for free to all of those other sites. The more you enjoy our community, the more revenue you can earn as a central figure in making that community a success.