Unfortunately I feel we're in a negative spiral, where good content (e.g. quality reporting and analysis, as in the example in the article) competes with free content which is just good enough to draw attention and pay for itself with advertising. Something is lost there, and in the rush to make everything free we're also losing the incentive for quality journalism or investigative writing, which are just too expensive to sustain on advertising alone.

If that results in a gradual erosion of quality as less and less effort is put in to researching and writing articles, and more and more of the content is churnalism or opinion pieces, then it's a net loss for everyone - eventually the adverts will be more interesting than the real content which lives in the interstices of advertising - I think that would be a shame. I've seen that happening in major newspapers in the UK like the Independent or the Guardian. We've seen the same in television with the rise of Reality TV etc - cheap to produce, controversial, and the perfect filler to squeeze between advertising segments.