The familiar economy of having the book buyer, the purchaser of information, pay for the information, is reversed in sponsored publishing. The sponsor wins by having his name, his product, associated with the freely distributed text. A discreet screen of product information, a company logo attached to a file is all it takes. The taker pays nothing at all.
Sponsorship is an easy and risk-free model, for the sponsor.
What is at risk, of course, is the objective sponsorship of truth. We see this sponsorship model in frequent practice around the Net today, vast electronic for-free Internet sandboxes such as SUNsite, funded by Sun Microsystems and Cisco Systems and others. It is kinetic advertising at its best, and it capitalizes on the fundamental shift in economics which fuels the new machine, the shift from the economy of scarcity, of buying and selling things, ideas incarnated as physical things, to the economics of abundance, where what is for sale isn't a thing at all, but the minds, the attention, of those paying attention to the ideas and information. In the economy of abundance, the status of having shifts to the status of having access. But even the subscription model comes up wanting in the Mosaic environment.