The Carr–Benkler wager between Yochai Benkler and Nicholas Carr concerned the question whether the most influential sites on the Internet will be peer-produced or price-incentivized systems.
History
The wager was proposed by Benkler in July 2006 in a comment to a blog post where Carr criticized Benkler's views about volunteer peer-production. Benkler believed that by 2011 the major sites would have content provided by volunteers in what Benkler calls commons-based peer production, as in Wikipedia, reddit, Flickr and YouTube. Carr argued that the trend would favor content provided by paid workers, as in most traditional news outlets.
In May 2012 Carr resurrected the discussion, arguing that he had clearly won the wager, pointing out that the most popular blogs and online videos at that time were corporate productions. Benkler replied with a rebuttal shortly after, arguing that the only way Carr could be seen to have won is if social software was considered as commercial content. Gigaom writer Matthew Ingram stated that "Benkler has clearly won. While there are large corporate entities with profit-oriented motives involved in the web, a group that includes Facebook and Twitter, the bulk of the value that is produced in those networks and services comes from the free behavior of crowds of users."