It isn't often that a Web 2.0 class business has revenue to burn on things other than lavish parties or sock puppets. Occasionally, though, a company (in this case iStock) will rise through the ranks and steal my heart when they send me an email starting out with bold words proclaiming:
"As you may know, iStock is one of the truly profitable social networking business models in the world [... w]e shared nearly 21 million in royalties with contributers last year."
Imagine my surprise! As of late, it seems that all I've been hearing about are folks complaining about companies re-using others' content and making a buck off it. When that's not happening, they're actually charging the user to produce content for their website. That doesn't take into account the companies, large and small, that haven't even started thinking about a business model.