Are Webmaster Resource Centers dying?

[Cyndalie]

Over the past five years I've seen an upswing trend of Webmaster resource sites popping up, spinning off a board, retaining writers and pushing out regular articles, updated directories, and pushing good amounts of 'webmaster' traffic through these both newbie oriented and time savers for pros type resource sites.

Lately though, it seems 80% of those online 5 years ago are now dead...haven't been updated since 2003, 2005, with more dead links in their directories than live ones, and some even advertising billing companies that have gone out of business 3-4 years ago. Why even keep these sites up?

I've seen the trend that since full resource centers take a staff to maintain and continue building upon, most simply can't handle the growing workload that never ends to keep the quality up. So many devote time to building up a 'board'...but with hundreds of adult boards, that is so diluted and tough to keep alive, the attention span of its owners tends to let them die so they can move on to more profitable projects.

The "if you build it advertisers will come" business model that many webmaster targeted sites have been created on simply cannot be sustained anymore. I think there are a few reasons for this...

Many resource sites point away from the direction of building well kept directories to make it easy for webmasters to find stuff, and simply become PR/News centers - by being able to deliver a message to both an online and offline (print) audience, advertisers pay top dollar for more than just traffic - they pay for branding and priority exposure.

But lately the ynot's, allofems, cozyfrogs, webmastervaults, seem to be shrinking, and while advertisers need somewhere to fly their banners, I wonder if the lifespan of these resoruce sites is going through a cycle being outshone by boards and news centers, or if there is a lack of newbie populations to sustain them .... is the webmaster population aging without new lifeblood coming in that the flowing pace it once was, say back in 2002? Or is it harder to get started now than ever - not on the part of the sponsors (setting up blogs and content delivered sites is easier than ever) but getting TRAFFIC that brings them to their knees.

I mean how hard can it be to setup a thumbnail tgp with a decent CMS backend you just load up content into a database and let it run itself for months at a time while you market the hell out of it?

I know I bring up alot of questions here, so this thread is wide open. Is the resource center dying?