Big Tech is Like the Penny Press

The business model in which content is provided free to audiences while advertisers pay to reach them did not begin with social media. It predates the web and television alike, beginning with newspapers in the 1830s and refined through a century of radio and broadcast television. The technology changed but the logic did not: the audience is not the customer but the product, and the content is the mechanism for assembling and sorting that audience. The penny press emerged in New York in the 1830s when publishers like Benjamin Day realized that a newspaper priced at one cent could not sustain itself through subscription revenue but could attract large enough readership to sell advertising at rates that more than covered costs. The New York Sun and its imitators were not selling information to readers; they were selling readers to advertisers. Sensational crime reporting, gossip, and human-interest stories were not editorial lapses: they built the audience that made the advertising worth…