A couple of ideas.
On revenue:
I think dredmorbius really covered it well. And I want to emphasize the infrastructure part. What about selling hardware that focused on the receiving endpoint? The target demographics probably have literacy/language issues with the content, so providing dedicated hardware to read text (instead of broadcasting actual audio, saving bandwidth), translate it, and do text-to-speech could be an example of some additional products to sell. Sell an app version too for middle-wealth countries. Selling infrastructure items doesn't create that conflict-of-interest in my mind that paying for content does.
Jumping off of the classifieds idea. What if you charged a flat fee, the same flat fee, for every submission regardless of what it was? If submitters truly have altruistic intentions, then this small flat fee is a small hurdle for the little guys, and probably a dead end for the very wealthy to try and overpopulate the system with whatever they want. So that the pressure is not on you to arbitrarily regulate the income sources. Decouple money from content is my main theme here.
On content:
I've never liked one-dimensional voting systems that are simply popularity contests. It's not that hard for a organized group to up-vote their propaganda (one group of many) while the altruistic content submitters are all left by the wayside (many groups of one). What I'd like to see is voting be not for submission, but for classification of content. It could be instructional, news, public service, propaganda, entertainment, etc. Then let your paid submitters be the ones to vote separately on ratios of these categories of content that finally get broadcasted. And only content that has been reviewed and voted for past a certain threshold gets proposed for submission. Right now, looking at the stream, I am already biased AGAINST stuff that is paid. Disclosure of that fact is great obviously, but what if a private org really is producing great content? I'll probably never check it out. A community filtering/classification of the content would put my mind at ease as the same standards of review would apply for paid and free content.
Jumping off of the classifieds idea. What if you charged a flat fee, the same flat fee, for every submission regardless of what it was? If submitters truly have altruistic intentions, then this small flat fee is a small hurdle for the little guys, and probably a dead end for the very wealthy to try and overpopulate the system with whatever they want. So that the pressure is not on you to arbitrarily regulate the income sources. Decouple money from content is my main theme here.
On content: I've never liked one-dimensional voting systems that are simply popularity contests. It's not that hard for a organized group to up-vote their propaganda (one group of many) while the altruistic content submitters are all left by the wayside (many groups of one). What I'd like to see is voting be not for submission, but for classification of content. It could be instructional, news, public service, propaganda, entertainment, etc. Then let your paid submitters be the ones to vote separately on ratios of these categories of content that finally get broadcasted. And only content that has been reviewed and voted for past a certain threshold gets proposed for submission. Right now, looking at the stream, I am already biased AGAINST stuff that is paid. Disclosure of that fact is great obviously, but what if a private org really is producing great content? I'll probably never check it out. A community filtering/classification of the content would put my mind at ease as the same standards of review would apply for paid and free content.