I once headed up content marketing for a small online publisher. It's a horrible job. You spend half your day trying to come up with clever headlines of an article you've at-best skimmed and the other half trying to game traffic sources like reddit or fark or harassing other sites for a back-link. Content is too cheap. Supply is enormous (huf po alone does 1000 posts a day!). So, it's a race to the bottom with everyone producing crap. It'll eventually get so bad that a larger market will open up for for-pay content like the nytimes where you're guaranteed some level of quality. I think the traditional pubs who can weather the storm will do just fine once we reach this point.