What boggles my mind is that people will work for $20/video, $15/article, or 8 cents to proof a headline. OTOH the video guy has shot 40,000 videos. I would like to think that, even with all this crap at the bottom, there will still be room for good, creative sites that deliver meaningful content.

Yeh, the problem will be how to find them. If the saying "crisis equals opportunity" is true then it sounds like the internet is ready for a ycombinator type ranking system that's independent of a Google ranking system.

Also, does this business model survive in a half-decent economy.

I doubt it.

Quality will beat quantity.