The Long-Term Greed-ification of the Web

In his autobiography, Warren Buffet, the greatest investor who ever lived, succinctly describes his investing strategy as ‘be long term greedy, not short term greedy’. While his approach was described in the context of investing and advocated sacrificing short-term gain for the long-term view, it has far-reaching implications for many areas of business, including online strategy.

To highlight how it applies to the online world, there’s a phenomenon occurring, deep under the covers of the Internet I want to draw your attention to.

First, Some Background

The web has gone through several evolutionary phases, both for publishers and site owners. First, when nobody knew what they were doing and content creators had no idea how to monetize the internet, people wrote content, threw it online, rinsed, and repeated.