Everything I have read or witnessed for the last ten years on this subject says "web businesses," small and large, have been doing very well. Where I think they and their customers are often frustrated is in facing an impossibly large and fast growing quantity of unorganized information and choices about what products and services to buy or adopt.

This is largely because -- as you restated my original point -- there is not much money to be made in information, at least not public-access information.

Nobody is talking about "saving" the New York Times here (it was mentioned once as a general example), or lamenting the declining cost of printed words. I simply observed what seems to be a troubling contradiction: markets need information to function, yet they've devalued it to the point that it's in short supply, or only offered for (unsustainable) altruistic reasons or through patronage and subsidies.

Relatively public-access information (as opposed to private intelligence) doesn't work as a product or service itself -- and yes it hasn't for a very long time. Now it doesn't even work well as an ad vehicle. For a small software ecosystem that's not necessarily a problem, as things tend to be centralized, choices sharply delimited, and information can be good in coverage and signal quality. Some projects seem to deliberately maintain that condition while others started there and then grew enormously, creating the odd situation under discussion here.

When you add hundreds of millions of users and businesses adding ancillary or subsidiary (or junk) support to the core product, good information, you have an anarchic scene full of hucksters. There's plenty of fun and opportunity to be had in that, but you'd think one of the opportunities is providing reliable sources that tell people what's the right way, the wrong way, and the WP way; what's worth your attention, time and money, and so on. This has great value, yet it doesn't seem to be readily monetizable value.

Maybe it's just a matter of time. I bet it can be done but maybe not at high enough profit to be worth it. The skills, knowledge, experience, and access it takes to be a knowledgeable authority in a technical field has many appealing (and more lucrative) opportunities than writing, so tech writing/reporting/reviewing may always tend to be someone's side project. That's fine, but it probably results in less information, less quality information, less independent information with a minimum of entanglements in business interests.