Devoted to online marketing, viral marketing, and web marketing

Now that information - in general - has become a commodity, those that learn ways of creating premium content, will end up owning the Internet in the future.

This is why you hear people mourning the introduction of Hulu.com, and the media battle to discredit Rupert Murdoch when he was trying to buy Dow Jones and Co. from the Bancroft family. The connecting factor was premium or professional content.

Lately we've heard a lot from those in the traditional media industry concerning differentiating their content in order to combat the commoditization of information that has come about primarily from the providing of tools by Internet companies to people who can say whatever they want.

This has made the Internet lively, but at the same time full of copycats and very unoriginal people. That has diluted brands, as far as content goes, and made it difficult to stand out from the crowd.

Internet companies that have helped create the Web culture of free are now scrambling to figure out how to continue operating their companies, as costs escalate, and the reality that they have to generate revenue is growing upon them.

Google (Nasdaq:GOOG), with YouTube, has already started to look for ways to add more professional content to its site, as the first month of Hulu.com was tremendously successful, and it launched with a business model. What the effectively will do is change YouTube from its former identity and overall purpose. Google will try to spin it so it doesn't look that way, but nonetheless it is true.

Rupert Murdoch has talked about the importance of the online Wall Street Journal in his Internet strategy, as he is looking to make it even better by offering up the type of content that his competitors aren't able to match. The reason why is so he can continue on with the predictable stream of income the brand brings.

Another traditional media billionaire, John Malone, who is the chairman of DirecTV (Nasdaq:DTV), says he thinks it's crazy that NBC is offering so much of the Olympics online for free, when they paid $2.3 billion for the U.S. rights to the games for 2004 and 2008.

That's another way of saying he doesn't believe they understand the difference between commodity and premium content. I think he's right. They obviously have to offer some content online for free, but there were a lot of things they could have done to monetize the content better.

I've said all that to say this: we must understand what constitutes commodity content and premium content. Those that get this will be the most successful online in the future, as they'll be able to generate predictable income from people being willing to pay for that content.

Disney (NYSE:DIS) understands this so well, that they're even trying to convince their investors that they're not in the content business primarily, but are more of a consumer goods company. They are doing this because of the cyclical nature of the hits-driven media business.

Those able to create content people consider premium, will be far more successful online in the years ahead, than those relying consistently on churning out big hits or campaigns that only last for a very short period of time.