( This is yet another philosophical basically self post, with no real conclusion or even inspiration. )
Scene from "Relatos Salvajes", a 2014 argentine film with a collection of great stories.
Introduction
cregox is my one-man company, which, right now, actually have a few other people committed to spending some time on it as well.
We're working in 2 very distinct projects with Unity 3D. And, in both, we'll need to find some way to market and monetize, since they're made to be free.
The mvPlayer3D is simply a free mobile video player, made with Unity. It's a temporary alpha name. There's nothing really "3D" about it, although it could have if it makes sense in the future. Right now, the only reason I'm using Unity is for simplicity of multi platform support and because I'm already used to the platform. The current player is quite good enough even at its current stage, and it only took me about a week of one man force hour to make it.
The Scientist Crab, although the script is in portuguese, should be an "international" (because there shall be no spoken lines) interactive animation. I like to call it e-Fi. I find actually quite complicated to explain any of those any further, so I won't even try. Suffice to say it will be equivalent to a short film and, as such, distributed freely. That's not to say we can't monetize it somehow. Anyway...
Ideas
I wasn't even thinking about gamifying them up to now. That's when I stumbled upon * this * and I found it very interesting. Not so much for the idea, but I could visualize a gamified video player! 
I'll quote and cherry pick keywords from there:
(...) generate revenue (...) integrate a Competitive Game Tournaments Platform within their skill-based game(s) that offers eSports tournaments
(...) provides gamers a fun and exciting way to play and compete against each other for real cash, virtual currency as well as other awesome prizes.
Our goal is to not only help popularize eSports for the web, PC, and mobile platforms but to also provide an engaging, fun and dynamically competitive environment for gamers while offering a new and unique monetization model for game developers.
So, probably we won't be using their services. None of our projects are games. But eventually we'll need a new kind of marketing and monetizing service which isn't too far off from these goals: "providing an engaging, fun and dynamically competitive environment" and "while offering a new and unique new monetization model for developers".
The novelty we look for is almost all that. And we think ads have their place as well. Merchandising and ads are made bad by the repetitive way they're presented. Always the same crap. Even podcasts, which try to integrate them smoothly during the show, may already be outdated. Specially because if you listen periodically a podcast you get tired of the same things over and over again. But also for the way it is done. It can be done in smarter ways... It only needs to fit in a good story.
We only need a good story
On top of the creative work, that is. After all, a good piece will necessarily be accompanied by a good story or else it won't be remembered. In fact, a good story by itself is already a selling material, but it also needs to be properly told. Both projects introduced above are all about how to telling the story. And eventually how to use technology to monetize it. It's a full plan waiting to be done.
There are so many ways to gain money today. Bitcoins and things like flattr are just a few examples of how fast things are changing in the financing area, specially good for creative workers.
For instance, this post is a bad story. Or at least have a bad ending for now. But I felt compelled to post it anyway... 
Eventually I'll edit this out.
