Opinion | How the $500 Billion Attention Industry Really Works

why do you have a like button? it makes engagement more measurable and easier to serve ads. all of our interactions are shaped by this.

You have to shift cultural norms to get new business models to work where people pay for content.

Advertising as a business model for the web was unplanned. Google thought they were going to license their search algorithm.

Ezra Klein:

Radio, newspapers, magazines, etc... are all heavily advertising supported. The only one not built on advertising is books, almost everything else we use to talk to each other is ad-based.

Ezra Klein asks: what comes first? the design of the internet, or what advertising needs on the internet? Tim Hwang think there is a deep path dependence in funding of platform companies. We have religious faith that if you aggregate a lot of attention online you will become the next Google/Facebook. We don't have a lot of examples of subscription