Opportunity for the quality option?

Today a friend working for a major portal was telling me about increasing demand from advertisers for something more than conventional adverts - in particular a demand to place sponsor driven content in their chosen editorial environment.

The same is echoed by by an article on Advertising Age about how GM are seeking to place extra sponsored content (in this case video) on chosen sites, not just ads. This is being positioned by AOL as a way of them being able to provide more high quality content on their site, but in reality advertising funded content, along with user generated content is liable to reduce the overall quality of what is offered to site visitors.

Surely this must point an opportunity for the quality option. Novel thought, but what about content produced by skilled editors, rather than advertisers and readers. Maybe there is a place for old media values in new media environments afterall. Maybe that's why FT own Pearson is forecasting record profits for 2006?