For years ad revenue has slid downward. But the decrease in money doesn’t correlate with a decrease in audience. Hence the discord over what, if anything, should be done about it.

The opinions are many and varied:

• No one will pay for online publishing because value is associated with the medium. Paper is what’s expensive.
• Devices or dedicated platforms might be the only way to elicit payment for online content (eg iTunes, Kindle)
• Charging for content is at odds with journalism’s evolution as a collaborative and public endeavor
• Online content should never have been free in the first place: charging for it will simply break the bad habit.
• What to do depends on what the publication is: some should be free, some paid for and some publicly funded.

The two sides of the fence in this argument have business people on one side and journalists and online analysts on the other. That in itself, I think, should guide us towards some consensus.

via Randall Snare, Business models versus editorial models: the online content dilemma – iQ Blog.

AOL is trying its most ambitious super-content project yet with freelance content site Seed.com: offering 2,000 $50 assignments on SXSW bands for its music site Spinner.com.

via David Kaplan, AOL Tries To Seed SXSW With Coverage Of 2,000 Bands | paidContent. Seed’s official launch post.

Privately, some within Google maintain that it is not their fault if media companies cannot monetise the traffic they are being sent by the search engine. Media companies need to become far better at exploiting their digital inventory.

Google’s Josh Cohen: Publishers Still Need Us | paidContent.

Current TV’s retrenchment shows the difficulty of grafting the freewheeling culture and sensibilities that have thrived over the Internet onto established mediums like television, where viewers often expect slickly produced programs and big-name personalities.

via Current TV to shift from video format — latimes.com.