cooking ideas and reputation, is it enough?

In our hypothetical tribe, however, people give what they have into the pot with no guarantee that they’re getting a fair exchange, which smacks of altruism……. But on the Net, a cooking-pot market is far from altruistic…… Your effort is limited to creating one – the original – copy of your product…… but millions of unique goods made by others!

I guess the cooking pot markets make sense to me in that this is what I see on the Internet, especially through my everyday life. The model makes sense, but probably not enough for media companies who wish to make money, or cash in reputation. Each individual on the Internet might be producing their work for fun, only asking for ideas in exchange or gain some reputation, but media firms want to find a fast way to convert bits and bytes into real world currency. Subscription model does not work and online advertising is increasing, but uncertain where it is going.

Google creates new ways for ad methods, such as AdSense, with complicated equations, but what else? Cumulating reputation and then cash in the reputation is similar to your cash return credit card: before you reach a certain amount of credit (reputation), it cannot be cashed in (maybe a little with advertising). But if you cumulate enough reputation, one day you can cash in whatever you have at hand for millions or billions, if lucky enough.

So media companies buy Web sites that already have a good reputation and a good audience base, such as Google bought YouTube. In addition to this, after investing in a Web site and since nothing can be cashed in immediately, how can media companies survive if the cash flow keeps being negative? Media companies cannot just do it for fun, can they? (so far I guess only Google say they do?)