Kevin: An article from 2009 that says that a glut of advertising space was one of the things depressing online display advertising during the recession. I wonder if things have changed as the recession eases. Tameka Kee wrote: "Even if the economy rebounds in 2009, it doesn’t look like the situation will improve because premium and mid-tier publishers are just creating too much content. When you add in the continuous stream of lower-quality user-generated content and social media inventory, the Journal says: 'The Web is likely heading for a shakeout on a scale unseen since the dot.com bust.'" I agree that a shake-out will happen, but like all such inflections, it's a matter of timing.

Kevin: Mathew Ingram at GigaOm has an interesting look at the failure of journalism startup NewsTilt: "One of the more glaringly obvious flaws in the company’s makeup is what appears to be a lack of interest in the problem NewsTilt was trying to solve. While the company had an idea of what it wanted to do for journalists — namely, to provide a platform for them to find an audience and theoretically build some kind of business around their content, similar to what True/Slant tried to do before being acquired by Forbes — neither of the founders had any background in journalism. Worse than that, Biggar admits that neither had much passion for the idea either; the startup evolved out of a plan to develop a better commenting system for newspapers."