Working in the digital marketing industry has given me a sort of backstage pass to the 24-hour-a-day variety show that is online advertising. As the Internet displaces print, television and other traditional media outlets, businesses and marketing strategists are doing whatever they can to attract and keep ad dollars coming in. While some businesses manage to keep up with the ever-shifting online advertising landscape, others need more time and resources to get their act together.

And although the majority of digital marketing firms, online publications and large brands carefully craft creative and effective campaigns, digital marketing is still a relatively young industry — so it’s pretty much inevitable that some campaigns will hit a wrong note or bomb altogether. It looks like The Atlantic learned that the hard way this week with sponsored content from the Church of Scientology; after less than 12 hours on The Atlantic‘s website, the effusive and disturbingly salesy piece was taken down and an apology was tendered to readers.

Like most mainstream online publications, The Atlantic runs sponsored content on their sites to generate revenue. Choosing and publishing sponsored content is always a balancing act between the right content and the right target audience; and a digital marketing campaign that entices click-through with genuinely interesting and useful content is usually more successful than interruption marketing tactics like pop-ups or splash page videos. This kind of permission-based advertising is working out well; according to a study by the Content Marketing Institute, 55 percent of business-to-consumer marketers plan to increase their content marketing spend in 2013.

But the failure of sponsored content tends to reflect a misreading of a publication’s audience, which is demonstrated by the near-instant backlash heaped onto The Atlantic from all corners of the social media chattersphere, including several Atlantic staffers. There’s also a real discussion to be had about the ethics of sponsored content that masquerades as journalism. But just like the commercials that air between segments of your favorite TV show or the previews shown before a movie in a theater, consumers have the choice to skip or ignore them. And Internet users must accept that if publications provide their audiences with free content, advertising must be a part of the equation.

Whether an online publication is a startup or a venerable magazine, investing time and money into targeting its audience is imperative. Trading readers for ad dollars rarely ends well—and although The Atlantic is sure to weather this storm, other publications that make the same mistakes could end up committing social media suicide.

I have a lot of friends who work at The American Prospect, the venerable progressive policy and politics magazine based in Washington, and who until recently, worked at GOOD, the progressively-oriented general interest magazine that laid them off recently. As the Prospect went through a major round of fundraising to pay off its debt and secure financing for another year of operations, and the former GOOD staffers have started a round of Kickstarter fundraising for a project called Tomorrow Magazine, I’ve been gratified to see people come through for both publications. And I’ve been struck by both endeavors as illustrations of the cost of doing quality journalism.

It’s not that I don’t think people know that doing reporting, publishing print magazines, paying reporters’ salaries, and maintaining websites costs money. It’s more that I think these projects have put a precise price tag on that rather nebulous “costs money” assumption. There are twenty two staffers at the Prospect, not all of whom are full time. To pay them, and to keep publishing for another year, the magazine raised $700,000 to cover operating expenses for the first quarter. That is, frankly, not a lot of money: it’s a figure that also presumably needs to cover production of the magazine, freelancers, IT, rent on offices, etc. $700,000 is a large number. But it is not a very large budget for a magazine.

Similarly, the folks behind Tomorrow asked for $15,000 to put out a single issue of the magazine. I assume they’re going to raise a great deal more than that—as I wrote this, the Kickstarter was at $11,174, mere hours after it was posted, and growing fast. But that was an amount of money that didn’t involve compensation for anyone working on the project. It was a figure solely devoted to “production, web design and hosting, tech needs, postage, and one amazing launch party.” Even though the Tomorrow staffers are aiming to make their dream magazine, these are still pretty low-budget dreams.

Not every publication has staffers who readers have a passionate emotional investment in and are willing to support financially. And not every publication needs to get crowd-funded or supported through a combination of foundation and private giving. But I do think that in our conversations about media consumption and supportable business models, it’s really useful to know what the minimum costs of putting out a magazine like the Prospect or Tomorrow, or a television show like Louie, or a great-sounding album are. The more targets we have, the more we can think creatively about sustainable business models that will help us consistently reach them. It’s one thing to want media to be cheaper. It’s another to suss out how cheap it can actually get, and to make peace with that.

It’ll be very interesting to see the result of a lawsuit currently brewing in federal court that is trying to shut down ReDigi (a judge backed the service, but an appeal seems likely), a service that will let you resell music you purchased from iTunes after taking quite comprehensive efforts to keep owners from having access to the music they want to divest of:

ReDigi says the plaintiff has a “profound misunderstanding of how ReDigi works,” pointing to systems in place to forensically analyze song files to make sure they came from iTunes, to delete files from devices, to upload files for streaming onto RAM, to control access to songs, to limit storage merely for personal use, and to allow users to downloads these files. If it all sounds complicated, yes, that’s the point. The semantic parsing of what’s happening in the transfer of music is at issue in this case, and it gets to the core copyright question, “What is a copy?” That’s an issue that the 2nd Circuit struggled with answering in the 2008 “Cablevision” case, where Hollywood studios attempted to shut down a DVR service that allowed users to store TV programming remotely. In that decision, the justices examined the transitory duration of data buffering and whether works are “fixed” in a tangible medium, and expressed some skepticism with studio arguments about copies being made along the way. But the 2nd Circuit handed Cablevision a win mostly on grounds that its remote DVR was merely acting at the behest of its users.

To be a bit clearer, what’s at issue is whether the doctrine of first sale, which gives content owners the right to sell their copy of content, but not copies of their copy, applies to digital content as well as to physical content. As the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard explains: “Currently, U.S. and European Union law have denied that the first sale doctrine applies to digital works distributed over the Internet, despite good arguments to the contrary. And the principle has yet to emerge in Asian-Pacific jurisdictions. The WIPO treaties currently stipulate application of the first-sale doctrine to tangible goods like books and CDs and not to intangible content distributed over the Internet.” It’s not surprising that this issue is coming to a head. Some outlets, like Amazon, already stipulate that customers can’t resell the files. But it’s not like the move to digital means that consumers will only want to be able to do different things with their content—it just means they’ll want to do more things, and have the ability to do all the old things as well.

But I do think that this mindset gets at two competing strains of thought when it comes to digital content. The folks I’ve talked to who download content outside of legal channels often come down to arguing that because they aren’t taking a physical object from its owner that could be sold for profit, they aren’t doing any harm. But extending first sale doctrine to digital content certainly means treating that content as if individual copies have value. I tend to think it’s in the interests of both content producers and content consumers, in terms of supporting the creation of new content and providing consumers with content of the highest quality, for content to be treated as if it has a value higher than free all the way through the process, and for content producers to focus aggressively on developing new licit ways to get content to consumers in a timely manner. But we’re a long way from reaching that consensus. Hopefully, this case can help establish some positive new norms.

Foster Kamer points out an interesting statistic reported in the New York Times that half of families with incomes over $75,000 have used internet-capable mobile devices to download applications for their children, while just one of 8 families with incomes under $30,000 have. There’s always a tendency to assume when one set of people has or can afford something and other people can’t that the thing is important, and particularly so if it’s something that’s billed as good for childhood development. And I get that impulse — nobody wants their children to be deprived, whether of educational advantages or of pleasure.

But I think it’s pretty early to worry that an app gap is going to cause lasting educational deficiencies for poorer children. The American Academy of Pediatrics is clear about the lack of benefits of screen time for children under 2. And there doesn’t seem to be particularly definitive evidence that apps give children who use them an advantage in literacy or other kinds of learning. According to a white paper from the Arizona State University College of Teacher Education and Leadership:

It is difficult to gauge what is actually happening, because the little that is known about the effects of digital media on emergent literacy skills development comes from educational television and computer studies, as well as from a few studies of other media and surveys…Digital media may be transforming the language and cultural practices that enable the development of emergent literacy skills. A new generation of young children is experiencing a new kind of interconnectedness in the language they see, hear, and use.

It may be that the optimism of folks like GeekDad or app evangelists may be justified. But until it’s proved to be so, it’s probably not worth a panic. That doesn’t mean that it’s worth doing nothing, either — it would, of course, be too bad if it turns out apps are a critical development tool and a lot of kids had been missing out. But I wonder if the best way to go about it is for developers to think beyond the Apple App store. You’re not going to get everyone to come to Apple, nor should you. If we’re worried about a digital gap, we should meet people where they’re at. And more parents should probably be getting the Academy of Pediatrics warnings through their doctors. That only 14 percent of them are getting that information from their doctors may actually be a more worrying suggestion that medicine isn’t adapting to the digital age as well as we might wish.

-You get that 21 Jump Street reboot you’ve been longing for on March 16, 2012.

-With all the kerfuffle over white rappers, it’s interesting that a prominent hip-hop ghostwriter is a white dude.

-Star Wars nerds + academic nerds = the power of the Force to illuminate history. (Academics in the audience, I’d be curious how you feel about this whole trend in mashing up academica and popular culture.)

-AARP brings its marketing power to the cause of getting your parents to adopt digital music.

-I’ll be spending my lunch break watching Missy Elliot’s “Behind the Music”: