Rupert Murdoch is realizing that the advertising model — give away the content and sell ads on the page — simply won’t sustain most major media operations.

See Murdoch vows to charge for all online content

I believe two things about media companies.

1. There are too many of them, and some will have to fail
2. They are going to have to quit giving away their content

Media companies have to provide content that’s worth something, and then charge people for access. (If people won’t pay for it, then by definition it’s not worth anything.)

This article highlights a problem media companies face today. In this case, The Washington Post paid a reporter to do research and write a serious piece, which was then largely stolen by another site. To make matters worse, the other site is earning advertising revenue from that page — off the Post’s content!

Google could be the publisher’s white knight.

When Google indexes a page, it checks to see if the content on one page is like the content on another page (and, from what I hear, marks down sites that have too much duplication).

Google could display that fact in the search results by making it obvious that site B is parasitic on site A? Google could invent a rating system based on the amount of content that is … borrowed … and give the URL a “parasite rank.”

Of course in some cases the publisher might want its content on the other page. Many content providers syndicate their content to other sites. In those cases, the publisher and the content partner would want to suppress the “parasite” label. All that would be required would be for the publisher to register with Google as a content provider and list its authorized content partners. They wouldn’t get marked down for borrowing content.

This would reward the people who actually generate content and would penalize the parasites who feed off of it.

The next step would be for publishers to push advertising networks not to place their ads on sites with a high parasite rank.