Opinion | How the $500 Billion Attention Industry Really Works

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

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.

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