My marketing idea

There's apparently this big problem where no one can figure out how to make money off of Web 2.0. I came up with an idea for this and I'm curious if anyone thinks it could work.

The problem is clearly that the old marketing paradigm (companies pay advertisers, who buy ad space from media, who show it to consumers, who buy the products advertised) is poorly suited to Web 2.0. The mass-market messaging of traditional advertising is just really clunky within the highly segmented realm of the internet. So far, marketers have been sticking to the old paradigm, tinkering with ways to insinuate mass-messaging into social networks, etc., in creative and sticky ways. But I think this is going at it from the wrong direction.

What if instead of changing how the ad space is used, marketers changed how the ad space was bought? Namely, why don't marketers start buying ad space from consumers instead of from media? This is already sort of what goes on when you watch TV episodes online on networks' pages and they make you watch a little commercial first: you agree to submit to advertising in return for the "payment" of entertainment. But the same idea could be expanded into an actual financial transaction between the company and the consumer. For example, marketers could pay MySpace and Facebook users to post ads for products they like on their pages. You can already be a "friend" of a product; but in this case, you would be a paid "friend." The catch would be that marketers would invent a new kind of spider to crawl social network pages and decide which people are the most popular and cool; these people would be paid more to post ads than other people. Similarly, on YouTube, the posters of videos that got the most views would get paid the most money for showing ads before their videos.

In other words, The Media would get cut out of the advertising loop. Instead of being providers of content, they would become providers of technology -- period. They would be paid by users, not advertisers. So, use of Facebook, YouTube, etc. would no longer be free. This transition from free to paid Web 2.0 would be similar to the transition from free T.V. to paid T.V. (cable).

This new marketing paradigm makes sense to me because it represents a true, complete adaptation to the user-created-content revolution. I'm not sure quite how it could come about, but I think it probably will.