Arun – that’s part of the question 🙂

The likely answer – and one that seems to be emerging in many scenarios – is that notions of value in a networked world have to be reassessed and moved away from traditional models where scarcity is the key. So whereas once it would have been good to keep assets under lock and key and charge a premium to access them, now (the argument goes) it becomes more sensible to *expose* content wherever possible – not necessarily *all* of it (ie. small images rather than high-res, or titles/abstracts rather than full-text).

So in answer to your question – the incentive is that you maximise exposure to your content (a Good Thing) by driving traffic to it through as many possible avenues as possible. What you do with the value model at the receiving end is dependent on the particular scenario. For museums, it might be to convert virtual exposure to ticket sales or hi-res prints. For authors, it might be to have free ebooks with exposed content being used to encourage sales of the “real” thing. For some scenarios (Twitter being the current classic example), it is simply about building such a huge user base that the business model (as yet to be defined) follows on in the shape of ads, a freemium model, etc.

I’ve written and presented a fair bit on the “scarcity / scale” approaches. Be interesting to hear your thoughts.