Ben Thompson– Platforms, Ecosystems, and Aggregators

Trying to sell content on the Internet is a loser's game ... What you need to deliver is a service—a service of continually making someone feel informed about something or continually delivering analyses they find valuable.

So many media companies view the Internet as killing their business, and it did. The ones that succeed in the future, though, will figure out how the Internet makes their business possible in the first place.

I'm a big believer that for a publication the most important story you write is the second story someone clicks on. Anyone can write one good article, but if someone goes to your site, clicks around, and the second article they click is also really good, they'll say, 'Wow, maybe there's actually some degree of consistency here, and I should be connected to this.

This is what regulars have to get through their heads: No one's forcing people to go to Google. No one is forcing people to go to Facebook—they're going there by choice. They could not go there. They could go to Bing. Or, as a better example, they could type in a URL.