A publisher can buy prestige to raise ad rates while remaining unprofitable

Evidence

AOL, seeking its own resurrection,*2 and having noticed the gap between The Huffington Post’s traffic and its advertising rates, bought the site in 2011 for $315 million and began throwing money at it in an effort to make the site more respectable. This bearing upwind, a variant on CBS’s “Tiffany” strategy from the 1930s, would, it was hoped, attract a higher class of advertiser. With more money, The Huffington Post was now able to hire seasoned reporters who were given full freedom and resources to write on what they wanted. The strategy yielded a Pulitzer Prize for The Huffington Post’s David Wood, a war correspondent who’d cut his teeth at Time in the 1970s and had also worked at the Los Angeles Times, Baltimore Sun, and other papers. So the HuffPost gained some dignity, but because it was expensive still failed to create large profits. Yet by 2015, it was attracting more attention than ever, and management was still saying things like “We could make it profitable right now if we wanted it to be.” Perhaps the site was by its nature never really meant to be a business exactly, but instead just a giant vacuum sucking up human attention. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 960

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the ‘premium content bought to attract high-class advertisers’ pattern, echoing CBS’s Tiffany strategy from earlier in this book, and resonates with the reading about platform business models.
• ADDENDUM: The HuffPost as a ‘giant vacuum sucking up human attention’ rather than a real business speaks to attention harvesting economics, relevant to the trees/sacrifice themes only loosely — actually better as a stand-alone.