Marginal Revolution: Is this a sustainable business model?

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Is this a sustainable business model?

Alternatively, you could call this "Markets in Everything":

The secret-spilling site Wikileaks announced this week that it's acquired thousands of e-mails belonging to a top aide to Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez. But don't look for them online. In a departure from its full-disclosure past, Wikileaks is auctioning off the cache to the highest bidder.

Wikileaks began soliciting bids from media organizations on Tuesday, for what it describes as thousands of e-mails and attachments from 2005 to 2008 that provide insight into Chavez's management, CIA activities in Venezuela and the Bolivarian revolution.

The winner gets exclusivity and embargoed access to the documents, though Wikileaks will publish all of them eventually.

Here is more.

Posted by Tyler Cowen on September 6, 2008 at 07:53 AM in Web/Tech | Permalink

Comments

In other news, I am selling pigs in a poke on eBay.

Posted by: at Sep 6, 2008 9:10:23 AM

Thanks for publicizing wikileaks. It looks like a fabulous site and I read about it here first.

Posted by: Hopefully Anonymous at Sep 6, 2008 9:28:13 AM

Is Chavez expected to bid on these? Sounds a little like blackmail.

Posted by: Josh at Sep 6, 2008 12:56:25 PM

Hmmm. The business model seems to be:

1. Establish a reputation as a purveyor of good quality information that serious bodies do not want revealed.

2. Use that reputation to buy information from sources and sell it on at a profit.

3. Prove your information was good, and prevent the authors simply buying in their secrets, by eventually publishing it all.

Looks commercially sound.

Looks to have worthwhile positive externalities for society; making it harder to suppress.

The risks are:

- For what price will hitmen take contracts on wikileaks executives?
- Competition. The barriers to entry are not high.

Posted by: Diversity at Sep 6, 2008 1:00:48 PM

And the USG is OK with this?

Posted by: tribal individualist at Sep 6, 2008 4:15:21 PM

@tribal individualist

I think the barriers to entry are higher than you posit. Reputation is difficult to obtain, and Wikileaks has it. A competing business would have nowhere to begin to get info easily (except via excoriating themselves publicly). Barriers to entry aren't always financial.

Posted by: Peter at Sep 6, 2008 8:14:54 PM

Sorry, that was to diversity

Posted by: Peter at Sep 6, 2008 8:15:28 PM

I'm hurt, HA, I pointed out Wikileaks way back when.

Posted by: TGGP at Sep 6, 2008 11:40:20 PM

This isn't blackmail. They are auctioning the information it off to "media organizations", and plan to publish the information at a later time, anyway.

Posted by: Rex Rhino at Sep 7, 2008 1:42:04 AM

This is just the same with the pic taken shots by Paparazzi. Any scandalous or controversial image is for sale.

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