Getting Paid: Consumers and Generators Of Culture Increasingly Insist on Their Due

The get it. And advertisers should be very, very afraid.

Even more so than their older, more cynical parents, reports suggest that members of Generation Y understand that their efforts, inclinations, instincts and actions have value. And that they are worth more than a few discounts.

Just as entrepreneurs launching an innovative enterprise recognize that they deserve some return for the value they are creating, so the progenitors of new subcultures recognize - and demand - that there be a return for the the concepts in which they are investing time and effort, if not financial resources.

This has been a long-time coming. Merchants and the agencies who service them have been living off the goosed-up profits that come from turning someone else's information into Big Data that can be packaged and resold. When your cost basis is zero, your profit margin can be infinite. But consumers are getting wise to this game, and the younger the potential data source, the more likely they are to have a sense of their own value.

They recognize that their value as avatars or leading indicators may well be greater than their value as customers. And they want to get paid. Now. The institutions most likely to prevail in this environment are those who are calculating what they can afford to pay for the best data. Those who continue to fight the trend and insist they have 'a right' to free data will find that the value of what they receive and what they can resell will diminish accordingly. JL

Moira Stewart comments in The Daily Mash:

"I want 8% of back-end subculture profits."

TEENAGERS are refusing to start an era-defining subculture unless there’s money involved.

Generation Y kids say they have the raw energy to create something way better than rave or punk, but first they would like to know who’s sponsoring it.
17-year-old Wayne Hayes said: “We’ve got great concepts interweaving music, drugs and politics in radical new ways that will change the world forever.
“But first we need a cash injection to get our subculture through the development stage.
“It’s not like we’re doing this just for the fun of it.
“Ultimately there will be revenue streams from downloads, merch and corporate endorsements. But we need investment capital.”
Teenagers are hinting at something ‘really big’ possibly called ‘Snung’ which over people 30 cannot relate to on any level.
16-year-old Nikki Hollis said: “It’s not just drum machines and weird hats, it’s something altogether different involving psychic powers and colours you can hear.
“But I want the government, my parents or any corporation to give me £60 per hour to think about this, otherwise we’ll all have to keep flogging rave to death, or just being into 80s charty hip hop in a semi-ironic way.”"