Tip jars are tacky and demeaning to our profession, akin to begging, and it has to stop. If I wanted a tip jar I’d work at Starbucks.

Tip jars exist because there is no good mechanism available that can recover a good chunk of the value inherent in news, blogs and other online media content.

Google Adsense is a good step in that direction, but it is far from being an efficient mechanism for anything other than Google generated content. It is very difficult to serve up contextual ads around news stories for example, as my buddy, Moreover co-founder Dave Galbraith, has often pointed out. That means poorly targeted ads, and therefore few click-throughs.

Yet there is a pot of gold the size of Manhattan waiting for the developer that figures out an efficient mechanism of collecting the value of content produced and published online.

Google ads are great for Google type content, which is a page of links harvested by machines. Google publishes those pages on the fly, and serves up ads alongside. Google advertising prices, which are set by an auction process, reflect very efficiently the value of a Google published page of links.

But most bloggers and professional online journalists are producing content that just has to be more inherently valuable to online readers than a search page full of links. Wouldn’t you agree?

However, since Google is the largest online publisher of web content (with a gazillion pages of search results published every year) this means online advertising on Google is cheap. Yet Google can still make a ton of money because its costs per page are extremely low.

So, does this mean that bloggers, and anybody else that is counting on Google ad revenues to pay for their content production, can only survive if they can match Google’s cost base?

I know that there are increasing numbers of bloggers making a decent income because of their use of Google Adsense. But they have to produce a ton of highly compelling content and attract very high levels of traffic.

The ROI in producing a single page of blog entries, or online news content, must be a googol (unit definition) of magnitude worse than Google’s ROI in publishing a web page of links.

Since Google is a machine-based technology, it is highly scalable and cheap. Human generated content production, such as online news and blogging, cannot compete within that scenario.

Humans are not scalable, they are expensive, and they are a pain to deal with. Servers are getting cheaper, and are getting easier to administer.

So, are we doomed? Is Google killing online journalism because of its runaway success as a publisher of web content? Has this abundance of Google published content depressed the overall price that can be charged for online ads?

Too many widgets on the market depresses the value of widgets, doesn’t it?