1) Many of today's professional content niches will be dissolving,

2) there will probably be fewer new niches springing up to take their place that are as financially profitable (probably no coincidence that most of the big, recent innovations have been about creating platforms for content rather than creating the content), and

3) in the niches that do survive as financially viable, I don't know if most of them would be able to support more than a handful of players. I mean, how many WSJs or Economists will the marketplace need/support? And while we might have more people trying to go the Gladwell route and make most of their money off paid speaking gigs, that would only work if there's a corresponding rise in the number of paid speaking gigs to be had, and I don't know if there will be or not, since that demand seems finite.

And yes, I have seen Jay Rosen's list of subsidies. It's a good list.

Thanks again for the comments. Good discussion.

It would be fun to see a Wiki-like response to Demand Media. One that runs similar algorithms that predict questions people will ask and then asks volunteers to produce better quality results.

The interesting question when you say "a few very rare exceptions in unique niches" is how rare? How unique? Because at the scale of the Internet, very rare is still very large.

I'm reminded of Kevin Kelly's 1000 True Fans argument. We define a true fan as someone willing to pay you one days wage a year for your work. if you have a thousand of them, you end up with 3x their average income as your income. That's a very livable income for a lot of content creators.

I come from a background of videogames, so we have been in a place where we've been competing with free and cross-subsidies since the beginning. And eeking out a living is very hard. But it is doable for some people, and more than one might think.

Also, another thing to consider is where the percentage of crap content increases. Even if professionally produced content keeps getting worse, would that matter enough to users to elicit some sort of change in behavior if amateur content (which already significantly outnumbers professional content) continues to increase and maybe improve in quality with practice and more former professionals entering the amateur sphere? My piece was focusing on the quality of professional (produced-for-pay) content, not the overall marketplace of content.

One is that the price of commodified information is going to crash, but non commodity information will grow in value. So this is stuff like the WSJ and Economist being able to charge for financial information while other papers can't have a paywall. Or Gladwell being asked to give major talks and being paid handsomely.

Another is that it will turn out that there is some minimum threshold of quality that we are willing to accept. If it's true that Google is getting polluted with increasingly low quality results, we should expect a corresponding drop in use around certain topics. Anecdotally, I am already seeing that in my group of friends. We've stopped using Google to do much research about buying because the results for WHATEVER + Review are so predictably bad. Google should respond to this drop by changing how they filter search results, or some other player should rise. I, for one, would love to see the ability to blacklist sites that are routinely non-useful for me from my search results.

A third is that the bad cheap information become so clogging that consumer retreat to high reputation providers. Reviews is one place where I don't use search anymore, I use trusted review sites.

A fourth is that content becomes a kind of loss-leader for other goods and services.