
There’s a Digital Media Crash, But No One Will Say It - mooreds
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/theres-a-digital-media-crash-but-no-one-will-say-it
======
Jaruzel
Relevant... I got told a few days ago that:

"Buzzfeed writers have to generate at least 1 article per day. There is no
minimum limit on words on the article, and the topic can be anything (within
reason)."

Once I knew this, the prevalence of low-quality Buzzfeed links all over the
web suddenly made sense.

~~~
reaperducer
One per day? I had someone at one of Vox's regional properties tell me they
had to do 12 a day (combination of local and national)!

One per day seems pretty light. TV reporters in medium and small markets are
usually required to turn out two a day (one package, one VOSOT). Radio
reporters sometimes five or six or more, depending on market size and whether
they're unionized.

~~~
jabretti
Cranking out one buzzfeed-grade article a day doesn't seem like much work.

I'm pretty sure I've already put more thought into this comment than they put
into most of their articles.

~~~
ge96
Automate it, a mad libs job haha, pick a random topic from the news, fill it
in with data, wonder how poorly written it would come out.

~~~
serhei
You may laugh, but it seems scarily plausible to develop a machine algorithm
that generates 12 articles, have a human go through to pick the 3 least-
ridiculous ones and do some light editing, and push it out to the news.

~~~
jabretti
Motley Fool seems to be the leaders in this -- if you search google news for
any stock you're interested in then you'll find that Motley Fool seems to be
cranking out largely-boilerplate articles about it; sometimes they seem to
have had some human intervention, other times they seem to be fully computer-
generated.

~~~
dredmorbius
I was seeing credible copy produced for financial reporting in the late 1990s.

The underlying data are available, the vocabulary is distinctly limited, and
the reporting was _already_ highly pro-forma. Mad-libbing a few variants of
language and selecting the best of the lot does work fairly well.

That actually raises the underlying question: why publish narrative copy at
all in cases such as this, rather than data tables or charts? News and
journalism are curiously allergic to data or presenting it in a usable fashion
-- I've seen tables essentially written out over several paragraphs that could
have been expressed in a few grid squares.

------
LeifCarrotson
> _there is basically no publisher in existence involved in any sort of news
> or political news coverage who says to themselves, my readers are demanding
> more of their news on video as opposed to text. Not a single one. The move
> to video is driven entirely by advertiser demand._

What's true is that no representative group of readers who have said what that
hypothetical publisher claims they said exist.

But publishers make the claim that they would say that all the time.

I recently was assigned a project to convert all our technical manuals into
100-second Youtube feature highlights. You pay me, I will do what you ask, so
it's done...but the analytics don't look good. Not even bots are watching
those videos.

> _Another way of putting that is that the future that VCs and other investors
> were investing hundreds of millions of dollars in probably doesn’t exist._

It doesn't need to exist for most or even an above-average VC. If those
hundreds of millions were invested by 100 investors at $1M in each of 100
companies, and 99 tanked but 1 unicorn made a 100x return, they would continue
to behave in that way.

------
davidwitt415
Josh Marshall is well qualified on this subject, and is walking the walk with
TPM by pushing it towards a subscription model, and away from too much
dependency on ad revenue. (He has previously published insightful posts on the
dangers of relying on Google and FB, and their capricious business practices).

In a larger way, this is an indictment/logical endpoint of the 'free' business
model. You still get what you pay for. Imo, it's too bad micropayments haven't
taken off, but i'm glad there is some traction in paid models. Perhaps things
really need to get shitty with free content (ahem, autoplay video) before
there is a correction towards quality content. Of course, that presents it's
own problems since those too poor/cheap to pay for content will remain in the
ad infested content mills.

~~~
em3rgent0rdr
> "Perhaps things really need to get shitty with free content (ahem, autoplay
> video)"

As if things weren't bad enough already. I can imagine they could get worse,
but I think we're close to the bottom (knock on wood).

------
soared
Everyone not in the ad industry loves to make claims about how its going to
fall apart, but no one I've seen has the expertise and data needed to back up
their claims.

Maybe the author has a point, but this article is incoherent. There is no
sources and the entirety is predicated on baseless assumptions and some
analogy.

No sources or even attempt to prove any claims:

\- There are too many publishers

\- There is a fixed amount of 'revenue seats'

\- Google/fb/etc take a portion of that fixed revenue

\- etc.

I don't even know what 'too many publishers' really means, but there is
undoubtedly not a fixed amount of revenue (double digit growth every year in
digital ad spend), and google/fb only increase that total amount of ad revenue
by acting as a ssp/dsp/exchange.

~~~
buttcoinslol
> There is a fixed amount of 'revenue seats' > Google/fb/etc take a portion of
> that fixed revenue

If you need citations for these, your burden of proof is a bit too extreme.

Unless advertisers have an infinite amount of money, there will be a finite
amount of ad revenue. At some point, there's a floor to how much ad revenue
you can capture while still having enough money to maintain a journalistic
organization, creating a fixed number of 'revenue seats'.

A portion of that money will by default go to the largest players in the
market, Google and Facebook.

~~~
j-c-hewitt
The real question is how much advertisers need online display. Most don't need
much. Honestly, online display has more meaningful competition from print
(yes), radio, and TV because it's more geared to branding.

For direct response, generally speaking online ads are more cost effective.
For the most part, you don't need to place direct response ads on publishers'
websites. You can just put them on FB or Google search.

I would say that it's a simple issue of aesthetics and performance. Banner ads
look like total garbage. Video ads on Youtube videos tend to be less appealing
than video ads on a big screen TV. Tiny thumbnail video ads on news websites
are visual pollution at best and a total annoyance at worst.

------
adventured
It's the inevitable come-down from over-inflating digital media start-ups in
the post great recession era.

The business is mostly a terrible one with mediocre margins, vast competition
and audiences that are fickle. There is also no real moat, other than
extremely deep pockets (which can help sustain a journalistic advantage
through ups and downs in the business). Content like that is almost like food
when it comes to dealing with consumers. With very modest margins, tons of
competition and fickle consumers, digital media start-ups aren't too different
from restaurants in their likely-to-die rate.

Venture capitalists love to invest into them because they all picture
themselves as media barrons. You see the rich person getting into news / media
syndrome as a trend that carries throughout time. They all want to do it: Jeff
Bezos, Warren Buffett, Steve Jobs (he was fascinated with Murdoch & news in
general), Patrick Soon-Shiong, Chris Hughes, Peter Barbey, Laurene Powell
Jobs, Viktor Vekselberg, Carlos Slim, Michael Bloomberg, Sheldon Adelson, John
Henry, Sidney Harmon, Joe Mansueto, Mortimer Zuckerman and on and on the list
goes.

For every rich person that does get into it, there are a dozen more that flirt
with doing so.

Rich people constantly trying to get into news / media, is the equivalent of
average people trying to start restaurants, with predictable results.

~~~
adventured
Splitting off from that comment, is the matter of reasonable valuations.

Allow me to propose that something like Buzzfeed, with $300 million in
expected 2017 sales, is really worth more like $400 to $500 million, less than
two times sales. Why? Its future growth rate is likely to diminish going
forward with scale (ie its fastest growth days are almost guaranteed to be
behind it). Its present growth rate is already down toward 10%-20%. Entities
like the NY Times set the ceiling on what Buzzfeed can ever likely hope to be
(in terms of business size), and that would be an extraordinary outcome. The
NYT is worth $2.8 billion, with $1.5 billion in sales (so less than 2x sales),
and has always struggled to have even OK net income margins of 10%.

Buzzfeed was perhaps once worth a reasonably high multiple on sales, back when
it had $20 million in sales and a high growth rate. All of these companies
have similarly rapidly run out of growth steam: HuffingtonPost, Business
Insider, Gawker, Mashable, and so on.

What's a low to medium growth, low max ceiling, low margin, high competition,
no-moat business worth? An appropriately low multiple, that's what. Anything
else is playing with fire, where you see a $1.5 billion valuation turn into
$200 million in a liquidation sale.

The dotcom bubble had a version of this. The Industry Standard was actually
highly valued (similar to Mashable's prior $250m valuation) for a brief time
back then.

So what's the argument for Buzzfeed being worth a future $5-$10 billion or
more (such that a venture capitalist would value it at $1.5 billion in a
round)? There's only one argument: another rich person wanting power,
narrative control, media influence, and to just generally play in that rich
person's sandbox, which is a story that gets repeated over and over again
whether it's a traditional tycoon or just a rich venture capitalist. Rich
people play in the news & media world like they do in art, swapping the assets
around at prices seemingly disconnected from reality, dumping them when times
are tough, paying hilariously overpriced rates for them when things are
booming.

------
tboyd47
I agree, but my question is, why hasn't the crash happened yet? Doesn't
everyone know most clicks are by bots?

~~~
slap_shot
This is anecdotal but I feel it's much more common than we talk about: when I
was in ad tech, I saw first hand how advertisers would spend money on
impressions for the sole purpose of being able to report to their higher-ups
how many impressions and click they got. Particularly for brands where
conversion attribution was difficult to impossible.

The media agencies spending on be half of the brand also have virtually no
reason to NOT spend ad dollars on fraudulent clicks and impressions - again,
they're just trying to get paid.

And of course the publisher doesn't care if the impressions are fraudulent.

Basically, there is a very large rigged economy in ad spending that both sides
perpetuate for their own good.

~~~
wils1245
I remember the first time I actually got raw logs of where my ad agency’s
impressions were ultimately going. It was just so blindingly obvious that it
was all a waste.

I came to the same conclusion you did. You’d have to go several layers up into
the client’s org to find anyone with incentive to do anything but tell the
most optimistic story they could.

That old agency is still around, surprisingly. My best guess is that whoever
is actually holding people accountable for the money spent just has a number
in mind that sounds reasonable, and has no expectation of seeing evidence that
it’s well spent.

------
indubitable
A couple of weeks back there was a headline about a site surreptitiously using
visitor's hardware to mine some form of crypto. People were upset, but it made
me wonder.. why isn't this a viable business model?

Crypto mining in lieu of advertisers would realign interest between content
producer and content consumer - the person who reads your articles begins to
be your customer again, instead of the companies advertising to the people
reading your content. The only conflict of interest is wanting consumers to
spend as much time as possible on your site, but I think that is a big step up
compared to the plethora of conflicts imposed by relying on advertising as a
business model.

This is of course ignoring the technicalities of working out a crypto where
the economics work here. But assuming that would be possible (which is
certainly a big assumption), this seems like an interesting concept that could
solve the monetization issue facing so many things today in one fell swoop.

~~~
o_nate
This is actually a great idea. Worthy of a post of its own.

~~~
mikestew
It’s been discussed repeatedly right here on HN. Unlike you, it strikes me as
one of the dumbest things I’ve heard in a while, and I can support that
assessment from multiple angles. But one person’s dumb idea is another’s
successful business model, and I’ve been wrong plenty of times in the past.
Like a sibling commentor, though, I catch you doing it and your domain will
never again resolve to a valid IP on any machine that I own.

------
eli
There are plenty of extremely profitable and growing ad-supported digital
media businesses. It's just not the Vices and the Buzzfeeds of the world.

Spending a ton of money up front to generate a huge volume of largely
undifferentiated visitors and then selling their ad impressions at very low
CPMs is not a winning strategy. And building it on top of the whims of
Facebook's algorithm was worse.

~~~
acdha
Do you have any examples of those profitable businesses?

~~~
eli
Well, you can check my profile for one :)

Skift is another (and if you've been following digital media for a while you
may recognize its founder Rafat Ali)

These are B2B examples. Consumer media is a lot harder because you have to
figure out a way to carve out a niche audience that is attractive to
advertisers, but I think it's possible. And I think success is a lot more
likely if you bootstrap something rather than load up on VC and debt in a
moonshot.

~~~
acdha
The B2B focus seems like a smart move — and it's good to see another local
business which isn't focused on the government, too.

------
downandout
He seems to entirely overlook native advertising. I know of a couple of decent
sized businesses ($50mm+ annual revenue) that depend almost entirely on native
advertising, because Google/Facebook ads in their niches are highly
competitive, and tend to not be ROI positive. Certain niches on Google and
Facebook are dominated by startups that are willing and able to lose investor
money on negative ROI ads in pursuit of growth. They drive the bids up, and
this creates a situation where existing companies and startups that are not
flush with investor cash must look elsewhere for advertising that is
profitable.

Further, Google and Facebook have an insane number of rules about how and what
companies can advertise, and therefore there are billions of ad dollars that
do not and will not ever enter into their coffers. These are not just in
scammy niches either...you’d be amazed at many of the ads that get rejected by
Facebook and Google. This pushes additional billions in ad money outside of
their ecosystems.

As long as investors are willing to fund losing ad campaigns, and Google and
Facebook keep increasing the number and breadth of rules that result in an
ever increasing volume of ad rejections, there will be publishers and
alternative ad networks that can enjoy vast amounts of revenue that gets
pushed to the fringes by these forces. They just have to position themselves
properly.

------
VonGuard
Ad-driven revenue models are just not reliable long term for media
publications anymore. All these sites dying or having issues were built on the
old world model created by newspapers 200 years ago. These models aren't even
working for the big TV networks. Their news is now basically 20 minutes of old
people new stories (stuff about Jesus, medicare, health care breakthroughs)
book-ended by ads for prescription drugs and adult diapers. Their only viewers
are 60+, and aging.

The new model is, actually, the oldest model: Sponsorships. Remember how
things like the Jack Benny Show were sponsored by Jell-O and Lucky Strikes?
That model actually works again. It's strange, but it's really is a bit
liberating (I work for a sponsored pub). We actually have the funds and time
to do extremely expansive pieces on deep topics we choose.

Having fewer people to keep happy means having fewer editorial bonds to
advertisers. In a pub with dozens or even hundreds of advertisers, all in the
market on which you're reporting, it's tough to not piss them off by reporting
on bad news about them. This happens all the time. ALL THE TIME. "You ran that
story about our listeria outbreak, now we're not advertising Chipotle on your
site anymore!" In the video game world, bad games with ads get good reviews,
or ads are pulled. Movies are the same way. Many publications cover the very
stuff they advertise, so it's a tricky situation.

You'd think sponsorships would be the same way, but they really aren't.
Instead, sponsors get to post their own content alongside the real good stuff.
Paid-for-content, as it were, which isn't even always bad, it's just stuff
these companies want to get out there where people will read it, rather than
sitting unread on their corporate blogs.

I am now convinced the sponsorship model is the way out of this. It might not
work as well outside of a confined vertical, however. One thing is for sure,
sponsors love being able to tell their side of the story to our readers, and I
feel like the readers just skip stuff they find too marketingy in favor of our
really good, deep content anyway, so it's kind of a win-win.

The other thing I like about sponsorships is it brings the colluding onto the
table instead leaving it hidden. In the past, I've worked at places where
they've been adamant about separation of church and state: advertising and
editorial are divided and do not talk, collude, or work together at all. You
couldn't take more than a $15 lunch for free, could take no free trips or
hotel rooms, and couldn't keep neat tchochkes or product samples.

Meanwhile, these same places would ALWAYS put their foots on your neck,
subtly, to influence content. They'd even send the lead sales guy and the head
of editorial out to do joint meetings which were only designed to sell ads. If
someone bought a large ad and you wrote a bad story about them, it could be
reworked, or even killed entirely.

Sponsorships, however, are known to be collusion, right? Now that I am at a
sponsored publication, I can take trips, dinners, hotel rooms. It's great! I'm
still making a great effort not to be compromised, but now I can do that in
Spain for a week at a conference. Makes a huge difference, frankly. I'm much
better at covering a show far away if I am in the show hotel instead of the
cheapest place my failing pub could afford to set me up, 20 miles away on the
side of the highway.

Journalists know how to be fair and balanced. It's kinda their whole bag. The
policies publications put in place to dictate this stuff are the first to be
ignored when things get thin and business goes sour. It's why some sites sell
their entire skin to McGriddle: that's sales getting creative with the design
team, because they can't get close to editorial. Not officially, anyway.
Frankly, stuff like that is to be praised. It's innovative and likely kept
some edit staff from being laid off or influenced.

In the advertiser model, the editorial team gets slapped around all the time
when revenues sag. Once the layoffs start, editorial integrity usually goes
out the window. Sadly, if it doesn't, the pub usually dies.

The nature of the business creates this death spiral where sites churn more
and more bad content, faster and faster in favor of getting the most possible
eyeballs on the most possible ads. The content becomes an after thought. The
more controversial and wrong it is, the more people read it, kinda like how
Howard Stern had lots of listeners who hated him for years. Steal from Reddit,
add 3 lines, post.

I once met a guy from Engadget who said he was in the Guinness Book of World
Records as the world's fastest blogger. He could do 15 stories an hour. And he
bragged about this, openly, like it was a badge of honor. Given some of the
content on these buzzfeed-like sites, I could do 30 crap stories in 10
minutes, but who the fuck would want to? They'd all be wrong and have kitten
pictures in them to grab hits.

I guess this is a long way of saying this: Digital media actually made
journalism shitter for a while, but maybe this culling will fix things by
making outlets figure out better, more innovative business models, allowing
new, better voices to come to light. It's the easiest time ever to start your
own outlet. Making money, however... that's always been the hard part.

------
stevenj
I pay for the digital NYT for one specific section of it and if I could just
pay for that part I would, but there's not an option to do that and the rate
for the whole NYT subscription is cheap anyway.

I browse the rest of the NYT maybe a few times a week, but I largely just read
the one section I like multiple times a day.

There's just a lot of competition amongst these big digital media
organizations, most of which have many employees. And the article's author is
right that they've been largely supported by VC money.

I think there is still room for good digital content that you can charge for
(e.g. Stratechery), but creators will need to focus on a niche that customers
find compelling enough to want to pay for (and I don't think finding one is
that hard). (I'd also immediately pay for Matt Levine's Money Stuff column if
he ever went independent.)

But most should be done with very small operations and staffs. The great thing
about it is that digital content has such favorable marginal cost dynamics.

------
barrkel
The "pivot to video" would explain why every third article I click from
outside my usual haunts has an auto-play video at the top that follows me as I
scroll down the page.

I've reached my limit; I've started blocking video CDNs with my adblocker. If
there's a video I really want to watch, I'll use a different browser.

~~~
_rpd
The Disable HTML5 Autoplay plugin for Chrome still works pretty well ...

[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/disable-
html5-auto...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/disable-
html5-autoplay/efdhoaajjjgckpbkoglidkeendpkolai?hl=en)

The author has stopped maintaining the plugin though because Google is
supposedly addressing the issue at the browser level.

Edit: This seems to be the recommended fix for Chrome ...

Set ...

chrome://flags/#autoplay-policy

to ...

"Document user activation is required."

~~~
davidwitt415
Neither option works on SI.com, one of the worst/typical autoplay offenders.
Hopefully, the Google 2018 fix will really take care of this.

------
reader5000
The content produced by millions of unpaid people like this comment is way
more interesting than the boilerplate content produced by paid people written
to conform to a particular zine's "style". The very idea of "lets pay a bunch
of people to write about shit that everybody already knows about" is absurd.

~~~
em3rgent0rdr
For this reason, my primary source of Internet reading is HN upvoted stories &
comments. I will often read the top HN comment on an article before reading
the article.

------
andyjsong
I think reddit is going to be the new model of digital media. They launched
recently profiles, which means users who have been fairly anon will have the
opportunity to start branding themselves as thought leaders in each respective
subreddit. It's already happened with breaking news. Twitter might be faster,
but there is less moderation and filter for fake news vs. crowd moderation
(not perfect). I wouldn't be surprised if they start their own editorial team
for news or a publishing platform and let the crowd moderate what's fake/real.
The only thing stopping them is trolls/shills, but that might be solved with
the profiles. They just need to convince users to come out of the shadows.

------
bishopknight
The answer is already here
[https://basicattentiontoken.org/](https://basicattentiontoken.org/)

~~~
em3rgent0rdr
As BAT requires a specific browser that I don't imagine it taking off. Also I
prefer a solution that doesn't ultimately rely on advertising.

------
CamTin
Is there a chance that any of this plays out in favor of small advertisers?
Seems like not, if current ad pricing is in part subsidized by VCs funding
money-losing media platforms and hoping to "make up for it in volume" as is
explained here. Will a "crash" result in less competition and therefore even
higher rates for Adwords/Facebook for small businesses?

------
NTDF9
I have come to believe that scale encourages mediocrity. The financial
incentive in scaling is to produce more output, as fast as possible, even if
the quality of output is low.

They make money by virtue of number of users rather than quality of the
product.

This explains why FB sucks so bad and still makes a lot of money.

------
JustSomeNobody
"Pivot to video"

I just picture the TV in Idiocracy with the video ads all around it.

Is that what we really want to move to?

~~~
sogen
It’s got electrolytes!

------
yuhong
I am interested in the problems of the entire ad bubble, including
Google/Facebook as well as the rest of the digital media. Google and Facebook
for example drive up house prices in Silicon Valley.

------
lsd5you
There is a perception in right wing circles that this is also related to
trumpism, after all this crash is happening with the stock market at an all
time high. A lot of these publications are at the 'progressive' end of the
spectrum and they may have misread the market, even for their core readers.

Specifically the media (and in particular digital media's) response seems to
have been one of all out activism against him may be working against them.
People don't explicitly want to be told what to believe. Or listen to people
drone on for over a year about the same stories (rightly or wrongly - but at
some point it ceases to be news).

~~~
curun1r
Perhaps one of the reasons that a lot of the struggling media outlets are on
the progressive end of the spectrum is that they mostly need to be profitable
through advertising whereas the conservative side can be run at a loss while
their backers recoup their investments through deregulation and tax cuts. If
someone could figure out a similar way to profit from Democratic government,
that could solve most of the funding problems for those progressive media
outlets.

~~~
bkeroack
> they mostly need to be profitable through advertising whereas the
> conservative side can be run at a loss while their backers recoup their
> investments through deregulation and tax cuts

This is insane. Show me one conservative-leaning media startup that was saved
(or turned profitable!) through "deregulation and tax cuts" without reliance
on other streams of revenue.

Unless you somehow mean that a better, faster-growing economy via deregulation
and tax cuts results in better business outcomes overall, regardless of
political leanings, which I would agree with enthusiastically.

~~~
curun1r
> Show me one conservative-leaning media startup that was saved (or turned
> profitable!) through "deregulation and tax cuts" without reliance on other
> streams of revenue

How about two:

[https://franklincenterhq.org](https://franklincenterhq.org)

[https://www.watchdog.org](https://www.watchdog.org)

Notice the complete lack of advertising. It's unlikely that either of these
two has much of a revenue stream beyond being funded by the Koch brothers. But
Koch industries has made billions being one of the largest polluters in the
world. Relaxing EPA guidelines on pollution is a huge business for them. So
there's no need for either of those two media outlets to ever make a dime on
its own, it just has to provide assistance for Republican politicians who are
friendly to their environmental agenda.

------
tryingagainbro
Tl;Dr

\--too many guys with laptops means way too many sites /blogs

\--Google and Facebook are gobbling all growth in ads. That new ad dollar is
being increasingly spent on Goog and FB.

------
folksinger
"The more information the better".

This dogmatic and unqualified belief must be revised by the technology
industry.

------
otakucode
I have never understood, not from the very early 90s and the very early days
of the graphical web and online advertising, WHY anyone ever accepted the
proposal from advertisers that they pay either based on clicks or based on
completed sales or things like that. It is insane. It is based on a
fundamental lack of understanding of what advertisement IS and where its value
lies.

Advertisers have, in my opinion, been getting a free ride for decades. They
get brand recognition for free. They get goodwill for free. They get customers
who know they even exist for free. They get knowledge of their product in
front of customers for free. They don't pay a cent for any of it. And content
providers just let this happen, in exchange for being paid based on driving
clicks.

Do you think television networks would have said "sure, OK" if advertisers
proposed they only pay for TV spots based on how many people showed up at the
store and said they saw the ad and it was what specifically made them go to
the store? Do you think radio stations would have bent over and said 'sure,
sounds like a cool idea' to advertisers wanting to only pay based on how many
customers came in and knew their jingle? Would newspapers have accepted only
getting paid based on how many people said they saw the ad in the paper?

OF COURSE NOT. Because every single one of those customers who 'glided over
it' or 'didn't see it' or didn't 'act' on it was influenced by it. And it is
wrong to give that away for free. When an ad appears on a website a user is
visiting of their own free will and desire, the simple mechanics of how the
human brain works creates a vague positive impression for the brand advertised
even when no one clicks at all. Advertisers know this. It's how they sell
themselves to businesses. And they rely on content providing sites being
either blissfully or willfully ignorant of this fact.

I can't help but chuckle at the timing, though. Print publications shut down
text in deference to video because advertisers want it right at the same time
the only video platform that is viable or ever likely to be barring a very
large lawsuit for anticompetitive practices, YouTube, running at gigantic
losses for more than a decade guaranteeing competition is impossible, has
decided it is disgusted by the prospect of large numbers of people making a
reasonable living from producing video content. They want to reform themselves
in a more traditional more centralized model where a small number of tightly
controlled producers of content will get rich, and the rest will either die
off or be starved. Eric Schmidt touched on the idea that he sees Google's role
in forcibly controlling (he would call it 'guiding') human culture as very
important. He is rich, therefore he is Better and it is right for him to take
the reigns and protect the seething masses from themselves. The same old
mentality Old Money has operated on for centuries coming to the nouveau riche
and technorati.

A mass migration of advertisers to YouTube will make Googles continued claims
of a desperate lack of interested advertisers seem more and more strained as
time goes on...

