Two major events make a trend. Now that Yahoo has purchased Associated Content, in the wake of AOL launching Seed.com, it is official that the major Internet portals see big profits in the ads they can sell on pages of cheap content.

The content categories on Seed.com read like the sections of USAToday: Entertainment, News, Sports, Lifestyle, Money & Finance. Today, hot topics on Associated Content include LeBron James, Lost, and Shrek. Is the commoditization of content just a B2C business, or does it have ramifications for B2B?

I sat on a panel yesterday for the Technology Association of Georgia, to discuss how to integrate social media into the marketing mix to generate leads. The questions from the audience validated what I've been seeing: inbound marketing demands that marketing orgainzations produce greater volumes of content, and monitor the social media constantly. This effort requires staff, which costs money, which requires some provable ROI before the investment is made. So many companies are still struggling to get fully on board with true inbound marketing.

So a "seed" model for B2B could be tempting to some B2B firms, but I don't think it will gain a foothold, and here's why: the stakes for both the buyer and the marketer are too high.

As a consumer, if I learn how to pack a suitcase, or buy a new breakfast cereal, based on a tip I read in a 250-word article for which the writer received $25, that's great. If the tip turns out to be a bad one, not much harm done.

But education and due diligence are too important in a B2B buying cycle. Let's hope that no CIO is going to be convinced to invest in a new network infrastructure, for hundreds of thousands of company dollars, based on a generic article that a random freelancer submitted online for a few dollars. And no B2B marketer would risk distributing the cheapest content possible only to be bested by the competition.

That doesn't mean that B2B content won't get cheapened in the scramble to generate more, faster. But the best content will generate the best leads, pure and simple.