[dguaraglia]

This is purely a PR piece. I'd guess there's not much editing going on, so claims like that will go through to the reader as long as they make it through Dropbox's PR (which is originating the piece to begin with.)

So, yeah, those are some extraordinary claims there, and nobody's going to check on them. Journalism is mostly dead in this country (except for some rare exceptions.)

[vonklaus]

A HNer made this same point in a different thread today. The child comment pointed out that (i'm paraphrasing) "people don't pay for journalism or content, so the only way to monetize it is as a vehicle to drive traffic and push ads.

[dguaraglia]

Absolutely. My thinking is the problem in today's world, specially on the web, is that you can't tie people down to consume the advertisement, so you have to fool them into consuming it.

In the good ole' days of pre-cable/pre-TiVo TV, people who wanted to watch a program would have to sit through the ads because they didn't know when the next segment of the show would start. Websites can't constrain you the same way because you are free to take an action against the ad: close the tab, change tabs, install an ad-blocker.

So what's the solution? You mask ads as content. You get a press release from a company, do some basic editing on it so it doesn't look exactly the same as in the other 50 or so blogs affiliated with the PR company, and you are good to go. You get paid, the client company gets good publicity and the PR company gets their slice. The consumer is none-the-wiser and thinks s/he got something for their time. Win/win/win/kinda-lose.