If the social or virtual goods market is exploding, expect it to also affect content online. Find a way to commoditize virtual content. So forget the Zygna virtual goodsvilles for a second, and start seeing 2010 as the  year of ubiquitous “content farming” - where all of the serious digital publishers start long-term planning. Writers and journalists will be told by their editors to create articles that - unless tabloid topical in nature - hold future or lifetime value. I.e., articles that stand the test of time, they don’t rest after a week, but gain continued readings  culminating in a heady 50,000 and up read count. Writers will be paid on ultimates: initial viewings, repeat viewings, sharing via social outlets,

The value of these lifetime posts? Well, to a Demand Media/Studios, AOL, Mahalo or similar, it’s a matter of quality (and quantity), think of it as quality based on what people are organically searching on Google, and quantity in terms of creating enough of a base of content that the YouTube’s of the world treat you as regulars. As YouTube’s video search is becoming a natural extension of text search, the ability to create posts in text and video is rapidly changing the landscape of content consumption. Users will start with the 10-step best of written articles, then graduate to video tutorials leading eventually to the user referring the post to others, include religious comment reading and the potential original user comment.

Sites like Huffington Post, the Gawker Network and other blog networks (blog nets) have been built on aggregated editorials - e.g., taking original posts from other relatively well funded or traditional media outlets and adding a little personal spin. That approach, while it’s worked out to a recent $300M valuation for Gawker’s templated Movable Type-hacked sites, may be changing as advertisers and publishers start jumping on the long tailed horse.

via The Twenty-Five Most Valuable Blogs In America – 24/7 Wall St.

1. Gawker Properties, $300 million. This group of blogs which includes Gawker, Deadspin, Gizmodo, and Lifehacker has about 23 million monthly unique visitors and 250 million page views. Owner Nick Denton has pointed out the business is highly profitable and growing and that advertising revenue has performed better than expected. Almost all the advertising at the family of websites is premium marketing from major companies. The average CPM on a page is estimated to be $20. That would drive $60 million in annual revenue. Gawker is not expensive to run. Its writers are paid relatively low wages. Many of the blogs Gawker owns have only five or ten writers and editors. Gawker keeps at least 50% of its revenue as operating income. The valuation is based on 10x operating income.

From Demand Media’s recent Manifesto, CEO Richard Roseblatt emphasizes that content farming doesn’t cheapen the role of the journalist, it just makes business sense and creates content creation transparency. If you’re a writer, expect to have your posts tracked extensively, leading to either profits or reassignment accordingly. To contemporary publishers, it means being relevant without sacrificing sustained interest as consumers use (and discover) more discovery methods to find content, whether new or lifetime.

via Our Manifesto | About Demand Media

A business mission is sustainable only if the business makes money. Our healthy revenues allow us to attract the best employees and content creators – and grow the business to match our vision. Demand Media is native to the Internet, so we don’t have the crutch of an off-line business to subsidize what we do. We believe our target consumers will not broadly pay for Internet content. And advertisers have told the world they are fed up with soft promises and underperforming campaigns. Put simply, to have a sustainable business model we must be truly excellent at what we do. On a daily basis we translate this mandate into a repeatable approach that gives users exactly what they want, attracting an audience that advertisers desire and that can be delivered with a sustainable cost structure. Some people act like this is revolutionary, or even heretical. We think it’s just common sense.

In Content NicheVille, niche discovery sits well with Demand Media’s early creation of content channels: 1. trying to create niche ownership (Trails.com), while 2. creating the nexus or index of articles at eHow.com.

AOL, looking to roll-up the traditional publishing world of news - print, magazine and video - has become interested in the lifetime value content as they see it as accelerating content monetization, creating more enterprise value than simple news aggregating and blogging.

Per SAI:

AOL’s text and photo freelancer platform Seed.com is still in beta. That means its mostly just a nice user-interface with a backend that remains a “framework.” StudioNow’s platform is much more polished, and could serve as a model for Seed.com. StudioNow’s 3,000 video-content producing freelancers are all over the the country, so they’ll be able to produce content for AOL’s local news blog network, Patch.

Demand Media has raised over $200M in capital, and is reputedly looking for an IPO or a buy in the $2-3B range, hence a little too expensive for AOL to acquire currently.

So, the content farming world will get more competitive. A potential digital Hatfields and McCoys’ environment in the works.

So what does this mean for Big Media and future publishing? They have  to shift away from purely seasonal content and go for the multi-year approach. Like films or television, it’s about creating the hit articles or video posts that resonate and potentially gamechange an entire category - or create a new category of interest. Sure, the Apple Tablet or Canvas will raise journalistic value, create rental paywalls and the like, but it will eventually come back to quality of writing plus quantity of views together.