“Above all, content will remain king—now more than ever.”
Quote from “Life After the 30-Second Spot” (Joseph Jaffe) brought to my attention by Fresh Glue. I don’t remember exactly when I heard the “content is king” phrase for the first time, but it surely was in the early years of internet. I think it was during a workshop in London that somebody presented something about this ‘new’ big idea. A couple of years later when email marketing came up, it changed a bit and we talked about “content is king, distribution is queen”. Good content alone was clearly not good enough anymore, the ones that found the smartest ways to distribute content were the new winners.
Lately I’m reading stuff like ‘content is NOT king’ and I couldn’t disagree more. This is also why I wanted to bring it up again. A lot of things have changed and are still changing on the internet these days, but if there’s one thing that still a big truth for me than it’s that content is king and distribution is queen. What has changed is who’s creating the content and how it is distributed or published, but the main idea still stands.
'Cross The Breeze 
Reading the link it seems the authors specifically talking about sites where your aim is to get them there and get them to buy. That’s fine if you’re looking for a one short commercial push.
But, it’s only with good content that you can get your customers to understand your values and associate themselves with you. That’s a much deeper relationship.
I do think the content has to be relevant. Long pages of boring text may be good for the search engine to index but lots of people don’t want to read too much!
Steve
I think the phrase should become: “Content is king and distribution is in the hands of the consumer”.
Geert