When pretty good is good enough

Further to the crumbling of pay walls at various key news sites, and particularly the decision of the New York Times to discontinue Times Select (see our earlier post). Scott Karp on his Publishing 2.0 website makes a very good point about economics of information being the main driver.

The new economics of media make charging for content nearly impossible because there is always someone else producing similar content for free — even if the free content isn’t “as good as” the paid content by some meaningful metric, it doesn’t matter because there’s so much content of at least proximate quality that the paid content provider has virtually no pricing power. As smart, talented, and insightful as the New York Times columnists behind the paid wall are, the are too many other smart, talented, insightful commentators publishing their thoughts on the web for free.

The monopoly of excellence, he says, where high quality content is competing with a proliferation of "pretty good" and "good enough" content, is coming rapidly to an end.

[Thanks to Michael Brooke for pointing me to this.]