I was going to write a post this week about the value of publicly funded journalism (I may save it for next week), until I stumbled onto this mind blowing video I squirreled away in my bookmarks a couple weeks ago.

It’s a presentation by Nicolas Lovell, given at the Edinburgh Interactive Festival, last August. He’s talking about the business of content industry and the “free to play” model.

Lovell’s key argument revolves around a simple economic concept known as price discrimination.

Quick background:

OK, so I briefly discussed content farms before, when I talked about hyper-local behemoth, Patch.com.

The reality is, content farms are a growing business. This includes AOL’s Patch and Seed.com, Demand Media, Yahoo’s Associated Content and Examiner.com.

Not only are these organizations making money, they’re hiring journalists in droves. This comes at time when most media organizations are losing money and laying off writers.

Of course, the journalistic merits of these operations are pretty suspect. For the most part they’re more worried about search engine key-words than journalism

I thought Mediashift’s recent article about Examiner.com brings up some interesting points.

Gawker Media now gets more unique-users-per-month than any paper other than the New York Times, according to a memo sent out by Gawker owner Nick Denton last week.

Gawker joins rival, The Huffington Post, as the second online media source to attain this distinction.

The journalistic merits of HuffPo and Gawker aside, it seems new media organizations have the drop on print newspapers when it comes to online.

While newspapers stick to their traditional story writing and distribution methods, blogs emphasize the so called “dark arts” such as search engine optimization. Gawker even pays their writers a portion of the ad revenue from their stories