What would be a good way to compare the article market with using something we already know? The metaphor of a currency market is not quite accurate...

Currencies and articles share a market mechanism where there is a demand and a supply side. The idea behind the good-and-bad money metaphor (used in the article: “be aware of the article production hype.”) is that intrinsic value of articles depreciates when more articles enter the market. If the article market is a numbers game than this would favor "lite"-content articles, because these will be supplied most (but demanded least). If an author is able to achieve the same goal (publicity and links) by issuing lite-content, why would the author write high-content articles? If more writers would follow this strategy the lite-content would dominate and there wouldn't be any use to write high-content.
This is the idea behind "bad-money that drives out good money" according to gresham law; bad money is money issued by coins that have little intrinsic value, whereas good money is money in which the intrinsic value is close to the exchange value.

Another idea why articles could become depreciated is the fact that all that is free should per definition becomes devalued some moment in time...

Yet another metaphor could shed more light no the article market. A comparison of articles with products does seems to make too much sense either.

For one, the article market doesn’t resemble a commodity market. The main characteristic of an article is that it is unlike any other article and that makes it different from a commodity.

An article is definitely not a service because that requires the initiative from a client. There seems to be an exception. I’ve seen articles from one of our top producer who services another company. That is real innovation, but only possible because of the unique production pace he is writing with.

In between a commodity and a service you could argue that an article resembles a product, but again the products are too differentiated to fit a market.

A new idea I have around this is that the article is like an air-mile. We all know the concept of air-miles; you receive them if you are a frequent flyer.
The article air-mile is a credit you receive for producing “quality” content. Each article that fits a certain criteria will increase your credit and the higher these credit -- the more air-miles -- the more likely that people start buying from you. Mind you that when you make a mistake you might loose air-miles...

Just an idea shedding some light on the demand-side for articles, it doesn’t yet explain the supply side of the article market.

© 2007 Hans Bool