Netribution v2
After Netribution ran out of money at the start of 2002, founders Tom and Nic parted company and Nic joined ShootingPeople.org, a mailman email discussion list for indie filmmakers, as first employee. The two founders of Shooting People had borrowed £30,000 to make a subscriber version of the email list to fund the cost of daily moderation, online profile directories and expansion of new lists - with a seemingly impossible business model of "users paying to read early the content that other users pay to produce". The business model worked, when Nic left there were 40,000 members, with a quarter paying, and a US office.
The success suggested that user-generated media could form the basis for a new kind of publication, and Netribution 2 launched with dozens of contributors submitting several thousand articles, from filmmaker diaries to uncut, exclusive interviews. After a few years, the lack of payment meant the good stuff thinned out, and the openness saw the only new submissions from publicists and link spam farms. The lack of a governance model meant these issues were never dealt with.