A few weeks ago, Jason Calacanis stirred up a revolutionary movement that has begun to and would certainly disequilibrate the blogging industry. He threw a challenge to all the free-content social networking sites. How far his challenge can win out in the industry and how long, is a matter left for conjecture. But there is a powerful lesson and inference for any serious commercial blogger to learn from his challenge. This is what I set out to articulate for any Adsense or commercial publisher that seeks to earn a good income from publishing.

When millionaire blogger, Jason Calacanis speaks, particularly with passion, I always set time apart to listen to him. Last month, precisely on 18th July, in his blog, he came out vociferously against free labour on the social networking sites. He, even with a prophetic tinge fore-told the death of free-content on social networking sites.

In his 18th July blog, he offered to pay the top-ten(20?) bloggers from the big social networking sites like MySpace.com etc. a minimum of $10 per post (or $1,000 per month?) for a minimum 150 posts per month. In the pursuit of his fervent believe that "...talented people's time in our society is primarily engaged with money...". He advocated the need to remunerate "talented people" because, according to him, "...talent wins, and talent needs to get paid. I love paying talented people so they can sleep well at night doing what they love. That's my biggest joy in business: gettin' people paid".

With an irrevocable declaration, he said: "I'm absolutely convinced that the top 20 people on DIGG, Delicious, Flickr, MySpace, and Reddit are worth $1,000 a month and if we're the first folks to pay them that is fine with me". He sealed the fate of these and similar sites with his prophetic reason- "The concept of "free" content producers, which I think WIRED called crowdsourcing, is going to be a short-lived joke. A loophole in the content business that will be closed by savvy startups which identify the top 5% of the audience and buy their time.

Having thrown the challenge, the web world has predictably been buzzing since the 3 weeks ago, when he wrote that 'prophetic statement'. It has caused quite a rumble, with sharp divisions on the two sides of "for" and "against". He is not alone in this drive, many other big bloggers and publishers too have embarked on this same method for quite some time now. They are still at an early but profitably promising stage.

The undiluted lesson of all ages from this method is TRAFFIC! Five of the ten topmost and fastest growing websites in the world are free and mass content-driven, according to the latest Neilsen ratings. Many of us publishers seem to be shy of mass original content. We seem to forget that the internet and the search engines were built to LOVE innumerable mass of original content. Google is not crazy when it agreed to pay $900 million in 3 years 2007-2010, for the 46-million strong MySpace monthly traffic of unique visitors.

I have studied some of the most successful publishing sites, including our ezinearticles.com, for some quality time and my findings show that there is a winning edge in mass original content. All the gimmicks and Search engine Optimization tactics would amount to little without this factor. I hope to dig further around the Calacanis Challenge in my next article for the benefit and proffiting of our budding blogger friends.