Most of these sites aim to survive largely on ad revenue - and there simply isn't enough ad revenue to go round. But the Web is currently neither a perfect medium for casual reading nor much of a medium at all for entertainment. So if you're building Web content, you may want to consider whether your content is going to help people get something done. Whether, for want of a better term, it is going to empower them. But empowering content looks more and more important as economic shifts continue to transfer commercial power from the producer to the consumer.
Consumers increasingly resist being spun a pitch.
But they also need more help than ever before to complete transactions and tasks of all sorts. To take the most obvious example, content can allow Web users to purchase services and goods. People only buy when they know what they're buying. So many sites provide information about products they have for sale. Amazon and eBay are two classic examples - and two of the elite group of Web sites whose business model looks solid.