Will A Company Ever Offer Stock Options To Its Community?

Last night in the shower (yes, the shower…I do my best thinking there) the question came into mind, will an online community ever offer stock options to community members? It sounds ridiculous at first, but there are some interesting reasons for why it might happen, and at the same time be a very powerful community builder.

1. Companies offer stock options to employees, employees help build the company. Community contributers also help build the company, just in a different way.

2. The same economics of stock options apply. The early users would get bigger chunks of stock options than users who enter the site later. Similar to employees that enter startups early receive larger stock option shares then those who join the company at a later stage.

3. It provides some very interesting participation motivations. One, there is an incentive to join a community earlier which helps mitigate the critical mass component that is only getting tougher to reach. Two, there is incentive for the users to make sure the content they contribute is of high quality, but also make sure the content that others contribute is of high quality. Reason being, if the quality of content is low then there is no value in the company and no value in their stock options.

4. Its another way to let users partake in the upside of what the community they are helping create.

There are of course reasons why this would never happen, or is just a bad idea.

1. It could get legally complicated, extremely fast. Not just with designating shares, but the unavoidable disputes that could be created by this system.

2. The stock option motivation would be hard to scale to millions of users. The amount of stock options that the 15,356,002 member would get would be extremely small, and therefore not worth much.

What do you think? Plausible, or never going to happen?