That kind of silly behavior has to stop. I have Democrat friends and Republican friends who are trying to make a living in the blogosphere space and frankly, they can’t. That’s because the large media organizations chose deliberately to go for eyeballs instead of real revenue. Well, it has to change. Otherwise it’s just a slightly better version of “Arbeit Macht Frei.”

I’m not investing in or supporting anything that doesn’t include returns for investors. The days of getting news and other information for nothing based on the work of other people who are working for nothing has to come to an end if we’re going to have an economy with people who can actually maintain their standards of living.

But information has various levels of quality. If you want all of your news to be vetted by competing twitter hoards, that’s one thing. But there is a place for paid news organizations, and the advertising model doesn’t cover it.

One problem is the Creative Commons issue. One popular variant of the Creative Commons license allows anyone to use, copy, and redistribute your work, as long as they give you credit (hat tip, link back, etc.). But there is no way to enforce it, particularly with raw information. Once it’s out there, it’s out there, and it may as well have come from your competitors.

The word is ‘and’.

If that is not capitalism I don’t know what is.

Yes the internet is disruptive, and yes companies that used to make money may no longer make money. To stay on top one must learn to adapt to new market conditions. If you cannot adapt you die, again capitalism at its best.

Personally though I feel that a news site throwing their content behind a pay wall is actually a bad idea, and in the long run is just going to decrease relevance of said site due to less visitors.