State of Paid Content

Paid Content:

The new economics of media make charging for content nearly impossible because there is always someone else producing similar content for free — even if the free content isn’t “as good as” the paid content by some meaningful metric, it doesn’t matter because there’s so much content of at least proximate quality that the paid content provider has virtually no pricing power.

This statement is a bit too universal - while paid content is under stress in consumer fields, content for corporate use - privileged information or valued commentary (by experts) on public information - still seem to hold value.