Every entrepreneur should understand the value flow before proceeding with a start-up, unless you're comfortable blowing-up investors like so many start-ups! I

Every entrepreneur should understand the value flow before proceeding with a start-up, unless you're comfortable blowing-up investors like so many start-ups! If you don't know who your customer is and WHY they will use (pay) for your service, you have big problems ahead of you. 1) Bloganda (internet) has beaten the publishing houses for promulgating corporate (group) memes. 2) Specialized internet platforms (ebay, CL, cars.com, autotrader.com, MLS listings) match buyers and sellers more efficiently than print publications, so that's where the money flows to now. As a consequence, prev(f)ailing publishing houses can't afford to pay above market-value money for low/no-demand content. Articles are the product of the writer and the information content is what people value. A good name (brand) is a derivative (effect) of regularly supplying the information desires of a non-trivial quantity of information consumers (subscribers/readers). 3) The editorial structure of the prev(f)ailing publishing industry doesn't scale outside of local/regional markets. The internet is global, right? I've written an article about the economics of the prev(f)ailing publishing industry, why it is a hopeless structure and where I believe the ball is moving. HN hell-banned the site in week one post-beta launch, so I can't post the url here. If you're interested you can search for: "will people pay for news"