I didn’t really want to jump into the whole “is it okay to pay social news editors” debate, but I’ve been getting so emails I thought it’d be easier to post a few brief thoughts than answering each person individually. Not that I don’t want to talk to people, but a body only has so much time.

First and foremost, I absolutely refuse to bet against Jason in publishing. He has too many wins, too much experience and a real knack for seeing ways of doing things differently. And that’s a winning combination that it’s always dangerous to bet against.

I totally agree with Nick Carr that this is the beginning of establishing an economic value to contributors. Also agree with TDavid’s Update that more content promoters is great for content creators.

That said, I hear what Mike Arrington is saying, in mentioning that this might not have much of an impact on Netscape or Digg:

I have a couple of observations on this. Netscape has a massively larger audience than Digg, but has absolutey failed to impact Digg growth at all. AOL placed a big bet on this product, and I imagine they want to see fast results. They aren’t getting those results. Jason’s post is a sign of desperation more than anything.

There is the question of whether or not this will fix this. Digg’s Achilles heel is that such a small group of active users drives so much of their success. However, even if those users bail to Netscape, others will certainly take their place at Digg. In my opinion, Netscape may gain some human assets and may get better story submissions, but Digg will probably continue to thrive.

Either way this is a great move. I’m not sure it’ll pay off, as there are a dozen scenarios in which this couldn’t work. But there are a few in which it could as well. And really, as an experiment, $12K/month isn’t bad at all. I’m happy to take a wait and see appraoch. It’ll certainly be interesting to watch and see if this can pull the new Netscape.com out of its tailspin.

And for the editors this is a great way to test the waters. It’s possible this paying editors bit totally won’t work. In which case the market will see that and react accordingly. After all until now we didn’t know if the value of social news sites was in the news, in the contributors or in the social. We’ll soon find out, and that in and of itself is crazy interesting to me.