Early internet platform costs enabled niche content mainstream media ignored

Evidence

Rather than pursuing lowest-common-denominator content for steady profits, the internet nurtured culture that mainstream media had ignored, from unfilmed scripts to MP3s from unsigned bands. Aspiring pundits at think tanks, such as Ezra Klein and Matthew Yglesias, pumped out daily analysis on health care policy too in-the-weeds for most news outlets. — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 167

Categorization

• XREF: This is the empirical basis for Anderson’s Long Tail — connects to the ‘death of the sellout’ mechanism the reader is tracking. — connects to: The precommercial web attracted people because it offered filter-free speech without advertising — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 906; Bandwidth metering made early web broadcasting prohibitively expensive — Theresa M. Senft, Camgirls: Celebrity and Community in…, 159; the MOC “The Viral Refinery: How Preexisting Fringe Fears Get Smelted Into Mainstream Reality”