If you’re not paying, are you the product?
⌨️🎉 The exact birthdate of Johannes Gutenberg, the inventor of the moveable type printing press, isn’t known, but it’s traditionally believed to be on June 24th, the feast day of Saint John the Baptist. So happy birthday, maybe, Johannes!
Issue #104: Reid Hoffman on Trump, (not) wasting away in Margaritaville, the history of emojis, and a tactic for unearthing your real values
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“If you are not paying for it, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold.”
This notion about how advertising works in mass media probably first entered the cultural conversation through “Television Delivers People,” a 1973 video art piece by Richard Serra and Carlota Fay Schoolman, which includes the lines, “You are the product of t.v. You are delivered to the advertiser who is the customer.” But the formulation above came from a comment on the community blog Metafilter in 2010, and has since been a handy way of thinking about any large, ad-driven platform, website, or app.
There’s an obvious tension there for media companies — if your customer is advertisers, not your audience, you’re selling attention, not quality (which a big part of the reason Medium is membership-driven). And then you’re competing for attention with everything from TikTok to Netflix.
This is true most acutely at the local level, where the possible audiences are smaller. As a recent Pew survey found, most people in the U.S. value local news, but only a small percentage (15%) are paying for it. And paying for local news, as writer
points out, is the easiest way out of this morass. He also offers some guidance on finding a trustworthy local news source (“Is the news source transparent about who owns and funds it? What do you think about its articles? Do you learn something from reading it?”).Lieberman’s story reminds me of a recent episode of the Search Engine podcast, where writer Ezra Klein joined host PJ Voigt to talk about surviving the media apocalypse after a string of high-profile closures of news websites. The takeaway, towards the end? “What we consume matters. What we pay for matters.”
What else we’re reading
- Silicon Valley and presidential politics: , investor and co-founder of LinkedIn, responds to David Sacks’ support of Trump.
- Did you know Margaritaville is one of the fastest growing and most profitable hotel chains? This deep dive into the company’s quiet but immense success hits on their strategy of idea-led expansion — being a brand that’s essentially about island escapism lends itself to thinking broadly about travel and leisure, including RV parks, retirement communities, casinos, cruises and more. As they say, it’s always 5 o’clock somewhere!
- Emoji is a portmanteau of the Japanese words for picture (“e”) and character (“moji”). Learn this and many other fascinating emoji facts — including the real meaning of 💁♀️ — in “Emoji: Japanese Characters that Became a Global Language” (if you want more on emojis, we wrote about how a summer intern helped create Apple’s first emojis back in issue #79).
Your daily dose of practical wisdom: defining your values
Instead of choosing your personal set of values from a pre-written list, monitor how you’re feeling in various situations and use that to help guide you into understanding what you truly care about. “We can often mine our experience — however it makes us feel — for useful information. Doing so allows us to see which values were lurking about.”
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