People don't get that when you make college free, you also take away a lot of the choice that goes into college. German colleges are free but the kids who are chosen to go to them are often selected by the third grade.
Lowering the cost of public universities while increasing the quality will pressure private universities to do the same, and thus make college more affordable and accessible for everyone -- it's a much better use of funds.
I was on a jury once. Many, many people can't follow simple jury instructions, figure out the difference between an argument and a statute (seriously), etc. And most of them had an education level beyond college. It was the most eye opening experience of my life.
If you're doing this for a living the last thing you should be doing is relying on Google ads. The publications that make money at this have sales staffs (and much higher CPMs, and no CLC campaigns)
You are exactly right. There were issues at UBM that had nothing to do with the industry at large. And GigaOm just had too much debt to overcome (IMHO). Many, many other tech pubs are thriving online, in site growth, revenue and profit.
And getting away from those Flash sales appeared to be a significant part of its downfall (at least according to the article -- that and the Europe expansion).
From my experience these types of programs frequently don't work for the same reason outsourcing articles to non-native-English writers often doesn't work -- most times, the end results don't "read" like a native English speaker wrote them, making it so only someone with English as a second or third language wouldn't notice the various awkward phrasings, etc. English is extremely tricky. If these programs do catch on, either we'll need more editors, or we'll move to a different, more creole form of global English (which I doubt).
Say the subreddit generally only get 5,000 page views a month, with one ad space per page. Once someone purchases those 5,000, it's gone -- they can't sell the inventory to someone else because it's all bough. Often too traffic will fluxate; so, for example, they may have estimated 5,000, but only 2,000 page views (and thus ad impressions, since one for one in this example) come in that month -- if someone bought 5,000, they'll have to stick around for 2 1/2 months, blocking other advertisers for that time. And I suspect that on many of these subreddits having even 500 impressions available is overreaching. That's a bit simplified but hope it helps.
You learn to just embrace the bitch label. It's the only way to get through it -- you're going to get called one whether you are or not, so you might as well own it and make it work for you. I'm actually a very nice person and treat my employees wonderfully but I've been told scare the shit out of certain people who don't know me very well. My reports have actually told me they love my reputation; they promote it so that 1) they get what need from other departments easier and 2) they don't have people fighting to get their jobs (I have by far the best department/division/employees).