Sorry I disappointed you at the end there buddy ;) I think I wanted to make two points, but in the end I got lost.

The first point is that we are indeed entitled, seemingly, to some portion of that profit. In the case of of Friends, I think the audience is the a critical part of the show, beyond simply the actors and production value. I was trying to say that we never got paid for watching.

The second point is that I wonder just how many people are thinking about this, i.e. how many will want more beyond the simple soft exchange (the entertainment value, knowledge, recognition, exposure). My reason for point out the examples was to show that we’ve seemingly not been too concerned since the reward seemed like enough.

The real challenge, now, is like negotiating partnership agreements. They always tend to suck and someone feels a little cheated when it’s done. There are ways to create systems to figure out the value. For example, Squidoo’s Lens Rank is an interesting concept and applies the principle well. Of course, Squidoo has quite humble intentions as well - is that true for most sites? The investment is significant to build out an infrastructure to actually reward those that are generating revenue. And there’s a lot of metrics and data points that need to be involved in that process.