Would you say many businesses in the new-media internet sector are equally oblivious to viable and sustainable revenue models?
Seems to be a gross sense of entitlement amongst consumers if you ask me. It kills off quality content providers in favor or knee-jerk social media and mediocre content generated by algorithms to maximize SEO/SEM juju.
My point is, there are two sides to this coin and somewhere in between is a happy medium. I don't feel either side has the best solution — yet.
Seems to be a gross sense of entitlement amongst consumers if you ask me. It kills off quality content providers in favor or knee-jerk social media and mediocre content generated by algorithms to maximize SEO/SEM juju.
The situation you describe is what is generally known as "supply and demand". If low-quality content is all that many people actually want, the supply is nearly inexhaustible and so the value of content does exactly what you'd expect. There doubtless remains a smaller market for higher-quality content who can be convinced to pay for it, but that's not the mainstream and probably never will be--and while outfits like the WSJ and NYT may be the best of the old mainstream stuff, they're still on the wrong side of the shifting market.
Most of the traditional media is in the unenviable situation of being neither sufficiently high-quality to reach people who will pay, nor sufficiently cheap to reach the new mass market. The only sense of entitlement going on is the media companies bellyaching that the market has moved and left them behind.
Murdoch is a hack and doesn't have the cojones to provide real quality, but at his age he'll probably be dead before his mistakes fully catch up with News Corp. In the meantime, if quality is what you're after, have you considered buying a subscription to The Economist?
I don't know, but some blogs (like TechCrunch) seem to be doing fine. Maybe the big news outlets just need to find a way to operate more economical, so that they can survive off online ads?
I definitely agree that many outlets are bloated and a lot of fat needs to be trimmed. That would be my first step before blocking search engines.
If I was a content producer (which I'm not so my experience here is limited) but I would be upset by sites like Digg, Reddit, Mahalo, etc. that simply aggregate news, drive up my bandwidth costs, and leave me with fleeting traffic. There's nothing really meaningful in this relationship. It's like a superficial date that never gives you a kiss at the end of the night, but always expects you to pay for dinner.
Not sure I understand the problem with Digg & Reddit: isn't traffic a good thing? Ads pay the same, no matter what path the people on your site took to get to it?
I was making a remark regarding dropping his content from Google. Wouldn't you say one of the important aspects in new media is getting your content visible to search engines in order to monetize it?
Absolutely! I don't disagree with you at all in that regard. But I also feel that a lot of startups overvalue traffic, hoping they'll be the next Facebook or Google when in fact they're never able to scale to meaningful ad revenue and bankrupt themselves chasing the often misunderstood notion of freemium.
