With Zynga banning all offers yesterday and Google announcing its proposal for a micro-transaction platform for online publishers, I thought this question was a timely one to try to answer.

I believe that we are only at the beginning of a fundamental shift in how content is monetized on the web. Social gaming companies have mastered thefreemium model and proven that people will pay for online content if they ascribe enough value to it. Other online content companies have also started to successfully test this model, including Pandora, and I expect many more to follow. As a result, I believe that monetizing an online content business with micro-transactions, display advertising and offers will all be in the mix in the not too distant future.What that mix looks like, however, is anyone’s guess and will likely be different for each content vertical (e.g. games, music, news, etc.).

Assuming that micro-transactions does become a more widespread business model for content, I think offers will be in the mix too and it could make a lot of sense for a media company to seriously consider purchasing an offer wall business right now. After all, if traditional media companies do start having a reasonable number of micro-transactions occurring on their content sites, they should also be able to make make money from those users that want to access the pay content but don’t have the money or simply just don’t want to take out their wallets.

I can already hear the grumblings that the offer walls have low quality advertisers promoting scams and the likes of Netflix and Blockbuster will just work directly with the higher quality publishers. I definitely think that there is a lot of truth to this argument. That is why I believe it will be necessary for an acquirer of an offer wall business to focus on working with quality advertisers and publishers as well as have enough scale itself. A media company would fit the bill here.

In many ways, I see a combination of a media company and an offer wall business very similar to the Overture/Yahoo! deal. The media companies have owned traffic and credibility while the offer walls have the network. Combining the two becomes very powerful as the margin associated with owning the traffic, makes it possible to offer better terms to network partners. The scale that this provides only increases advertiser demand (and prices) and now this business can really benefit from network effects.

Given the challenges with many of the current online content business models and the negativity around offer walls, this would seem to be a very low risk/high reward approach for media companies. I’d be interested to hear your thoughts.