Content still matters for the very simple reason that the lack of decent content means you don't have an audience to sell to advertisers - imagine if the Econom

Content still matters for the very simple reason that the lack of decent content means you don't have an audience to sell to advertisers - imagine if the Economist's only rival was a website written by middle school geeks. It is, effectively, the central overhead to the media industry - as high a quality as cheap as possible to get as many eyes and ears (and fingers, for braille readers) as you can. Online media's winning out because the "cheap as possible" part of that equation is Very Cheap Indeed, without having to sacrifice the slightest bit of quality. But, yes. It's the quantity of audience that determines profitability, not quality of content. So now we're stuck with the dilemma as to how to make advertising presentation a high-quality content unto itself - a nontrivial balancing act between advertiser and reader expectations.