This is a very good comment on the difficulties a commoditized market faces:

It's not the bureaucrats fault that the media market fundamentally changed. The big three stopped making a product Americans wanted to buy. The American media has never had more readers. People want what we make. They just consume it differently now. Creativity isn't the problem; finding a new way to make money off it is.

Publishing platforms now approach a cost of zero. The barriers to competition that the old media had were largely ones of capitalization. To compete with a newspaper, tv station or radio required a lot of capital, and hence a large market, and consequent economies of scale to be economically viable.

Today, a computer and an account on blogger is all that is needed to publish in a similar format and on the same distribution channel as the New York Times, the Sydney Morning Herald, NBC and 2MMM.

Historically when a market has commoditized then labor costs have been reduced in some manner or form; usually through importing or out-sourcing. Today the media market is so effectively de-capitalized that people all over the world are giving their time away for free - or for the return of google ad-sense; say a couple of hundred dollars a year.

It makes you wonder what the car market might be like if it under-went such a radical form of decapitalization and commoditization. Kids love cars, constantly draw them, render them, read about them; adults are not much different. If it was as cheap to make a car as it is a publishing platform then we might see great variation, creativity and expression on the roads.

More likely however, most people will not change the default 'theme' and the standard car will be sky blue and white with sans-serif fonts - al-la wordpress.