Is there a sustainable model in Content Farms?

“Content is not just king, it’s the emperor of all…” – Rupert Murdoch

Monetising is almost the sole challenge of the Internet. 

We’ve spent five crazy years producing blogs and video and articles and who knows what in the belief that time – and simply the mere existence of all that content – would solve the issue of how to make money from it all. And then the CPM market goes and seemingly crashes on us… and surprise, surprise, the punters won’t pull out their credit cards and pay for the content.

I could go on for days and days about the malaise – and the possible remedies – though that is for another time.

The reason for the blog is a fantastic post on Techcrunch on the premium content space. The article can be found here: http://techcrunch.com/2010/04/10/aol-demand-media-content-farm/.

Essentially, the author has broken down revenue versus quality of content (scales of premium content) and indicated where the different content models sit in terms of revenue. Hollywood (video) at the top, and user-generated crap at the bottom in terms of revenue pulling power via advertising.

The author then questions the viability of business models – especially those straddling the middle-ground – and asks where to from here…