The New York Times: "Content": "The biggest news in the book world this year – before Jonathan Franzen was K.O.’d by Oprah Winfrey, anyway – was that Fay Weldon, the sardonic British novelist, had been paid by the Italian jewelry company Bulgari to write a novel celebrating its products. (Weldon didn’t try to hide anything; she called her book ‘‘The Bulgari Connection.’’) The literary world’s moralists were, predictably, outraged. But the biggest surprise about the reaction to ‘‘The Bulgari Connection’’ may be that anyone was all that surprised."

Many web sites turn into subscription-based services, or offer ad-free paying versions. People buy DVRs such as the TiVo partly to skip the ads. But as we can see in the offline world, some content products tend to turn themselves into the ad. Remember Mission Impossible 2, the long Gucci/Apple/Audi/Rayban infomercial? With such product placement tactics creeping inside paying products (from books to movies), I doubt that "ad-free" paying sites will remain really so. Expect sponsorships to sneak in (as in "this web site was coded while wearing Calvin Klein underwear").