Advertising revenue exceeding costs created the viable mass media business model
Evidence
At some magical moment during that first year, it happened: the lift generated by paid advertising exceeded the gravity of costs. And at that point, like the Wrights’ aeroplane, the New York Sun took flight, and the world was never really the same again. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 40
Categorization
- XREF: This is the foundational moment of the attention economy — connects to Wu’s whole thesis but also to later media-economics work like Benkler’s. — connects to: Early broadcasters saw audience size as the key to advertising profit — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 342; Prodigy pioneered online advertising as its core business model in 1991 — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 699; Advertiser competition freed brands from subsidizing content creators — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 957 (+5 more)
- SHARE: Good for anyone interested in media economics or the origin of the attention business.
Broader Connections
- Advertising industrialized attention by converting it into a resellable commodity
#expands(0.90) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 24 - Mass-media profits derive from non-reciprocal attention exchange
#expands(0.85) — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 251 - Platform profits come from harvesting user attention and selling it back to advertisers
#expands(0.80) — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 43 - Large agencies industrialized advertising into an endless machine for attention capture
#expands(0.75) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 183