EM: Who will make money in the media world of the future? How will they do it?

JJ: Ah, the $64K question. Bloggers are making money at this and they will make more. PaidContent and other trade bloggers are making a living; Gawker Media and other blog companies are turning profits; BlogAds is enabling individuals to make even six figures. And Google AdSense not only paid my 12-year-old son $110 last week for his blog but did something even more important: It cleansed the cooties off of citizens' media. Still, AdSense and its equivalents are the lowest rung of the value chain; they are about nothing but the coincidence of a word on a page. This new medium is all about relationships and we need a new ad infrastructure to measure influence and not just impressions and to serve and audit marketing served via networks of citizens across text, audio, and video. Build it and dollars will come -- at high rates, for advertisers will eagerly buy the opportunity to speak to and through influencers.

The lower cost of production in citizens' media also will create opportunities as big media companies wake up to the realization that there are ways to make media at much lower costs. And they will desperately need to lower their costs as declining audiences put a stop to ever-increasing upfront ad rates.

One caution: Online is a scarcity killer. When media isn't fed through hoses, time isn't limited and that means time isn't money anymore. And with no end of content producers, the value of content and even talent as a scarce resource will decline. I depressed the hell out of an old-time columnist when he told me he wanted to use blogs to find a new home for his column. Bzzzzzt, I said; it's not a column now, it's a conversation. He said he needed a paycheck. Bzzzzzt, I said; there are bloggers making a few hundred or perhaps thousand bucks a month doing this. The poor, old dinosaur wheezed: You mean, I've spent my life building a reputation and brand and I'm competing with people making $2k a month? It's worse than that, I replied: You're competing with people who are doing this for free just because they love it.

Which leads me to Jarvis' Second Law of Media: Lower cost of production and distribution in media inevitably leads to nichefication. The corollary: Lower the cost of media enough, and there will be an unlimited supply of people making it.

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