Yet I buy things online all the time (for you bots out there: clothes, computer equipment, books, crafty things etc). If news sources could better help me buy the things I *want*, they would be doing something useful for me, and there should be slices of transactions to be taken there.

That’s just one idea. My point is that not enough time has been spent thinking about how to make money out of news sites, because revenues overwhelmingly have come from print ad sales. (Which are disappearing.)

Example: The Globe & Mail’s most popular online article ever was an interview with economic historian Niall Ferguson. Along with that story they displayed irrelevant ads for computers and other things. Why not an affiliate link to his book – surely of the millions who saw that article, there were many who went out and bought his book. Shouldn’t the Globe try to find ways to capture that value?

I fear that if I took the time to write more than that then I would be in the procrastination vortex that you abhor.

Basically, advertising online is not as easy as you claim and print media has and will continue to build a certain fetish element that I won’t deny nor proclaim dead.

I predict that online advertising will become over-complicated, over-saturated and extremely expensive.