if you would consider paying someone to solve this problem for you, then learning about the problem is valuable. You wouldn't pay someone to talk to you about startups in general, so don't waste your time on it.

So why am I reading your article, swombat? It has no specific advice about startups that I can determine. Perhaps the topic is "how to stop wasting time"? If so, haven't you written exactly the kind of generic article you're railing against?

That was a bit of a cheap shot, but I love the recursion involved so I took it anyway. :) Now on to the substance.

The problem as I see it is twofold: first, the person consuming the content they enjoy never sees it as something that's self-indulgent. There's always some kind of reason they can come up with to justify it. Many times it can be an upcoming task. The mind is a wonderful thing. This is one of many reasons why it's good to have somebody to report to.

Second, and more to the point, you make a delineation between things that have "...concrete and obvious value to you..." and "...randomly reading all sorts of articles..."

I'm not so sure that such a delineation actually easily exists. What I've found is that I pick up material on problem X I want to solve and once I get to the meat of the answer -- which sometimes takes many hours -- it either ends up being a sales pitch or so tied in with some particular method of doing business as to make it unusable.

Startup advice is contextual. It's very difficult to do generically. So if I want people to love me on Facebook, I pick up an expert's guide to Facebook marketing. He talks about his business of making CDs for indie bands and how on Fridays he started giving out free CDs as part of a contest. This drove up likes and engagement 100-fold.

Great idea -- if I had a product. Or if I had a product people would enjoy and talk about if it were a contest prize. Not so good if I'm offering a service.

Or let's say I want the SEO rating of my business blog and landing page to increase. So I pick up a few books and lectures -- specifically tailored to my concrete problem -- and consume them.

I can tell you how that story ends. a) don't be a sleazebag, b) make sure the technical details of your site are dialed in, and c) do things like write great content to make your business popular! Then people will come and share by word-of-mouth! Popular businesses get lots of traffic! mirabile dictu.

You can spend tens of thousands of dollars for that advice and end up pretty much where you started. All they're really saying, which is completely true, is that if you can make your business popular, people will talk about it. True, but useless.

Perhaps a technical example will help. Let's talk building systems than can handle huge amounts of traffic. So let's assume, without an idea of what my business does, that I want to make sure it fits on a stack that can grow massively and easily as my customer base grows. So I go out and buy some books or listen to podcasts on building huge systems. (By the way, there's a huge number of people doing just this. Why they are preparing to run at Google-scale without any product at all is a very interesting question).

But you know where that road ends? It ends with something like "once you have a business model, you'll know which architectural pieces you need, so then you'll be able to start designing your system". There is no easy or one-size-fits-all answer. It's all contextually-dependent.

Yes, if I had some kind of static, atomic problem that I needed advice on -- perhaps building an HTML5-enabled website -- buying little bits of atomic solutions would work. We programmers are used to buying information like this. "I need a book on AWS provisioning using Puppet" or "I need some help on typed exception handling in Java" But when you finally come up with something that is so stand-alone, it has absolutely zero business value. It's just technical information to assimilate.

So yes, I enjoy reading "How I got a billion people watching my YouTube videos which created a steady stream of income to my self-help site" But it's been my experience that, unless it's just me and I'm just impervious to absorbing information, after I finish I'm going to be left feeling something along the lines of "Wow. If I only had a business that allowed people to groom their pets with power tools, I could use every one of those pieces of advice!"

That doesn't make consuming such content useless. It just makes it a hell of a difficult thing to do. In my opinion, in order to be useful, you have to have content tailored to some long discussion you're having about a business hypothesis you're testing. It's extremely difficult to get that in itty-bitty mass-produced chunks of interviews. Not impossible, but extremely difficult.

Peer-to-peer, ad-hoc, informal communication is a million times more effective than publish-subscribe interviews or presentations. Especially in areas where the information is nuanced or highly context-dependent. In my opinion the reasons you're seeing people shell out money to all kinds of startup-assistance services and sites is NOT because they are receiving some terrific value from them, although I'm sure each has its fans. It's because there are tens or hundreds of thousands of people desperately trying to do exactly what you suggest: get immediately applicable help. But they're not finding it.