Content has always been notoriously hard to monetize. It seems surprising, as most people would agree that good content is valuable. It brings insight, opinions, perspectives or pure entertainment. 

In the physical world, we still retain a certain tangible principle to content. You can touch it, squeeze it, burn it or throw it. You pay for the object, and you own it, herein lays the value. However, when we transpose content to the web, it suddenly loses all value. I can’t own it, and I can’t feel it. I can’t touch or weight it. 

The nascent Internet

The Internet changed many things. One of the most relevant ones was the scarcity of content. Replicating physical content was hard. The Internet, though, made replicating and distributing its digital counterpart a child’s play. 

Content that was unique before, lost its uniqueness as it became wildly distributed online. The old content gatekeepers struggled to keep up. The Internet’s capillarity wrestled their control away from them. As content became widespread, it became harder to concentrate large audiences under a single banner. Without eyeballs, it was hard