The central problem I observe, orthogonal to the one outlined in this post, is this: there has been, for many years, a symbiotic relationship between publishers

The central problem I observe, orthogonal to the one outlined in this post, is this: there has been, for many years, a symbiotic relationship between publishers and advertisers. The publishers are the host organism; they draw life-giving cash money from the advertisers. The advertisers are the symbiote, and they consume nourishing eyeballs secreted by the publisher. Print, TV and radio publishers increasingly used the money to subsidise their consumer offerings, which increased the yield of eyeballs. Everybody wins! The trouble with the New Era of internet-enabled everything is simply that the bottom has fallen out of ad revenue. There is not enough money for this old relationship to continue. Advertisers on the web are parasitic, not symbiotic. They get plenty of eyeballs; the publishers get chump change. This is an unsolved problem - analogous, say, to the streaming/Spotify problem. How many billions of people would have to lay out $10/mo on Spotify to keep the major labels in the junket-hopping, coke-hoovering manner to which they had long become accustomed? It's not going to happen. The reckoning, to my mind, starts not with the 1,876 marketing startups, but with the dying revenue models of mainstream publishing, broadcasting etc. After that, well, you can be neither a symbiote nor a parasite without a healthy host, with a ready supply of tasty eyeballs.