I read Anil Dashes's post The Interesting Economy a few days ago and didn't think much about it. Below is a key excerpt from his post

Today, Flickr has interestingness, which is a measure of some combination of how many times a picture has been viewed, how many comments it has, how many times it's been tagged or marked as a favorite, and some other special sauce. I suppose revealing the exact mix would encourage even more people to game the system, but the fact that it's not disclosed has led to a number of attempts to reverse-engineer the system. I doubt any of them are/will be successful (Flickr can update/evolve fast enough to change the algorithm if they figure it out) but that's probably going to be an ongoing dialogue.
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What I'm wondering is, how is Flickr's interestingness different than the economy in Game Neverending? Than Second Life? (Or in Evercrack or Neverwinter or any of the other gaming platforms.) Is interestingness its own reward? Why don't I get to level up or power up when I create something interesting?

More to the point, the in-game economies of these games translate pretty cleanly into real-world cash, with eBay amplifying the efficiency of the currency conversion. And interestingness in other online media (like blogs) is rewarded by cash in a pretty straightforward way; I can sign up for TypePad, check a box to enable text ads, and pay for my account or point the proceeds to my PayPal account when I start getting lots of visitors.

But interestingness in Flickr doesn't pay. At least not yet. Non-pro users are seeing ads around my photos, but Yahoo's not sharing the wealth with me, even though I've created a draw. Flickr's plenty open, they're doing the right thing by any measure of the web as we saw it a year ago, or two years ago. Today, though, openness around value exchange is as important as openness around data exchange.

Since I read this it seems there has been a bunch of blog buzz about Anil's post. I found this out via Robert Scoble's post Anil Wants Flickr to Pay. Robert seems to think that the current trend towards "user generated content" is really about companies exploiting end users for money. I guess I'm biased because I work on services such as MSN Groups and MSN Spaces, but I disagree with Robert and Anil.

Using free services on websites like Flickr is a commercial exchange of goods and services. Flickr gives you a place to host your photos so you can share them with friends and in return they get paid for their services by placing ads around your photos. If you disagree with the terms of the service you can decide to choose another service such as Kodak's EasyShare Gallery (formerly Ofoto).

As with all things there will be some photo albums that will be more popular than others. These photo albums will likely bring in more ad clickthroughs and thus more money than the average photo album. Is this unfair? I don't think so. Is it unfair that my use of Google or MSN's search engines is subsidized by people who click on ads and I don't? Should people who click on more ads than the average user of a search engine be paid for doing so? 

Getting back to Flickr, since using the service is a commercial exchange entered into willingly by both parties I don't see why one could claim it is unfair. I can see the argument that Flickr should figure out how to reward its customers that bring in subtantially more ad revenue than the average user, but that would just be good business sense not something they are obligated to do.