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I think there will always be some amount of great content accessible because brand & popularity are required to be able to charge, and there will always be some

I think there will always be some amount of great content accessible because brand & popularity are required to be able to charge, and there will always be someone who is either really hungry and willing to put the extra work in, or they are just doing what they love & delighted to share it. Pieces may go behind paywall (like our site or iTulip) but they both still share lotes & sites like KhanAcademy offer tons of great accessible content. The big issue though is that in most markets people have to get a bit shook down before they find what they need. I remember thinking that search and ads were going to be huge when I bought Inktomi & DoubleClick stock during the last stock bubble. I of course got my head served on a platter on that, but it was cool to get into search a few years later & be right that time. The Google IPO gains made up for the losses on the earlier bets, but everything comes down to timing & then just sticking with something you believe in. The first site you find in any category won't likely be the best one, just the one which is the most heavily marketed. But the same was true before their was a web. The hard part with paid content is that the more common it becomes the harder it is for Google or other ad networks to take a big slice of the value chain. For that reason I see the move to paid online content being a slow one (outside of niche b2b sort of environments).

ChuckMcM 16y ago
Valid points, I won't bore HN with my theories about what makes the information economy tick but suffice it to say that the value chain will evolve as efficiencies in the market are developed. "The Google IPO gains made up for the losses on the earlier bets, but everything comes down to timing & then just sticking with something you believe in." Yes, but Google's performance in the last 5 years hasn't been stellar (from a stock perspective, instead what might have been dividends is being banked by the company, which is another rant) The tricky bit is understanding why Google and not Altavista or Yahoo? Not because they didn't have traction and penetration, but I believe because they didn't understand the economics of what they were selling. Imagine that Zog the caveman starts getting trade goods for pies made out of mud. He's thrilled and others get into the mud pie business, but one guy realizes that the pies that people want are round and hard and so he also gets into the mud pie business but only makes his pies out of hard fired clay. He becomes the dominant mud pie seller and runs the other guys out of business. Could they have prevented it? Sure they could but they needed a better understanding of how and why customers valued their mud pies. Google got there sooner and it gave them a tremendous advantage, but at the same time, to completely abuse the metaphor, they realized they had an elephant's tail and knew when to step aside when the crap came out. But they still struggle with elephantness, or at least they did 12 months ago :-)

ChuckMcM 16y ago

Valid points, I won't bore HN with my theories about what makes the information economy tick but suffice it to say that the value chain will evolve as efficiencies in the market are developed. "The Google IPO gains made up for the losses on the earlier bets, but everything comes down to timing & then just sticking with something you believe in." Yes, but Google's performance in the last 5 years hasn't been stellar (from a stock perspective, instead what might have been dividends is being banked by the company, which is another rant) The tricky bit is understanding why Google and not Altavista or Yahoo? Not because they didn't have traction and penetration, but I believe because they didn't understand the economics of what they were selling. Imagine that Zog the caveman starts getting trade goods for pies made out of mud. He's thrilled and others get into the mud pie business, but one guy realizes that the pies that people want are round and hard and so he also gets into the mud pie business but only makes his pies out of hard fired clay. He becomes the dominant mud pie seller and runs the other guys out of business. Could they have prevented it? Sure they could but they needed a better understanding of how and why customers valued their mud pies. Google got there sooner and it gave them a tremendous advantage, but at the same time, to completely abuse the metaphor, they realized they had an elephant's tail and knew when to step aside when the crap came out. But they still struggle with elephantness, or at least they did 12 months ago :-)