I also don't understand what is meant by "unqualified" traffic. If you mean traffic that comes from external sources and doesn't come through the front door, then I don't believe it's a myth that traffic that comes via deep link can lead to profit. Any and every page view can lead to profit, regardless of the route taken to it. If navigation and promotional elements are designed properly, EVERY page functions as a front door anyway. Imagine further development of technology, tracking and permission marketing that will allow a news site in Missouri to serve up a San Francisco car dealer's ad to a reader in California who happened to find a news article on the Missouri site through a Google search. That's just one possible way to make money on outside hits from outside your geographic region.
As far as Google or some other aggregator being positioned to be the greatest content company of all time, you bet, I agree, that's how people will be using the Internet. It's up to news web sites to figure out how to use that model, both within its own site and leveraging it to other sites, in a way that makes money.
Hasn’t deep-linking also helped such altruistic “news” sites such as Yahoo!, MSN, and AOL??? Deep-linking became so valuable that they were soon able to charge exorbitant rates for the “privilege” of being “deep-linked”. If deep-linking runs unhindered, I think intelligent consumers of digital content will be most loyal to the best deep-linkers, and become indifferent to original content producers. In this light, I think Google is positioned to be the greatest content company of all time with its infinite flow of free inventory.
