I agree. Fame and competition - especially for limited resources, whether that's featured placement on a site, elite status, or a limited pool of other rewards

I agree. Fame and competition - especially for limited resources, whether that's featured placement on a site, elite status, or a limited pool of other rewards - tend to be much stronger motivators than simple financial rewards. Not to say that financial rewards alone can't work (unless I'm missing something, that seems to be how eHow farms most of their content), but my last company (Revver) focused primarily on rewarding users financially for creating and sharing video content. It's not the cleanest example because of some of the related implications of that decision: not including copyrighted content for fear of negating DMCA protection, having large media companies uncomfortable with the reward structure around dispersing content freely, etc. While some content creators really treated the endeavor as a business and looked to maximize profits as much as possible, most were really in it for the fame - and Youtube had the built-in audience we couldn't build (especially without stolen, copyrighted work early on). I still do think there's a happy medium between the two - with fame / competition being the primary motivators and financial rewards being included as bonuses or perks. At Revver we had that priority order reversed, thinking that financial rewards would be big enough motivators to bring traffic and content.