(An interesting side note of the current situation is that startups like Blueland can’t just radically scale up supply overnight to capitalize on the unexpected demand: Beyond production constraints, air freight costs have increased 6x, Yoo says.)
These companies, the attention economy itself, and the consumerist society that gave birth to it, deploy vast resources to turn as many people as possible into passive consumers, to reduce us to our eyeballs and our wallets. Because the more control a company can get over those things, the better their stocks will perform.
This is obviously not a monetization stream that can be applied to every single media company out there—if you focus on collectibles, it’s an interesting one—but the strategy behind it is one that all companies should be trying to think about.