Really?

Dennis, take a look at my comment at the end of Shel’s post (to which you have linked).

There is absolutely no evidence to suggest that their model decouples sponsorship and agenda setting. If you wish to offer evidence, feel free to post links and the rest of us shall review it and form our own opinions.

Evidence from researchers such as Dan Ariely (Duke Professor of Behavioral Economics and visiting professor at MIT’s Media Lab) suggests that we have a love affair with FREE things and we irrationally sacrifice quality in the process. Undoubtedly, this applies equally to free information.

So long as firms such as RedMonk continue to offer “free and unbiased” content to readers they shall maintain popularity in the end-user community whether or not the content is genuinely valuable or unbiased. Of course the content is subsidized by dozens of corporate sponsors. What percentage of their content is subsidized by donations from the end-user community? I suspect zero. Draw your own conclusions.