by Peter Kafka

After years of training people to expect that whatever you can find on the Web will be free, media companies are trying — desperately — to reverse the trend, and figure out how to get people to pay up. Or at least some of the people, some of the time, for some stuff.

There are plenty of problems with this plan, and I think the biggest one is that there’s simply too much commodity content on the Web — stuff that doesn’t have any particular value to anyone, or at least not much more or less than something easily available somewhere else.

(Aside: The scenario above is great for Google (GOOG), which helps you find the commodity stuff no matter where it is, and bad for most publishers, who used to have control over their distribution. But I don’t see how you can blame Google for that.)

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