The only “link economy” that really exists is the black market for webmasters who buy inbound links from other websites in order to improve their search engine rankings. This practice is explicitly against Google’s terms of service, but there’s big money for eCommerce (or porn) sites who rise to the top of the search results.

But there’s the distinction. The folks buying links are doing it because they already have another way to monetize their sites — typically eCommerce. The links just help SEO, which drives traffic, which the sites then convert to sales revenue. In an of itself, traffic is worthless if you can’t monetize it.

And there’s the problem. News sites already have tons of traffic — millions of visits. And they can’t adequately monetize. Double that traffic, and it’s still not enough to keep the business going.

(I personally hate the CPM ad model. It says that all page views are equal, whether that’s from 1 million people who see one page and never come back, or from 1,000 people who each view 1000 pages over the course of a year. )

The companies buying in to this “link economy” aren’t thinking what they’re getting out of it. Yes, links lead to traffic and search rankings (which lead to more traffic). But so what. Do the math: if you’re company doubles, triples, or even quadruples traffic (and most won’t even double), that’s not going to save you. You’ll have a slightly lower deficit. Your content costs more to produce than you can monetize with existing ad CPMs. Some will try paywalls. Some will succeed and some will fail. I can’t fault a company for trying, and in fact I do subscribe to a few general online publications and would even if they double the price.

Getting to your original point though, this “link economy” is puffery. Jarvis can talk about how this problem will be solved by “entrepreneurs, not institutions”, but he should realize that as an academic, he’s an institution, not an entrepreneur.

There is no need for you to apologize for challenging Jarvis’ hair-brained ideas. It’s long troubled me that he knows nothing about business strategy and profitability and that he has an agenda in terms of who butters his bread. Keep up your good work. Everyone has life challenges and Jarvis shouldn’t be using those to make people feel sorry for him.