If the media landscape isn't well organized across such a large society, or particularly when you have a massive new audience to introduce to news systems (China has gained what, 600 million new regular Internet users in the last seven years?), there's an amplified benefit to aggregation / managing all of that information. Which explains the seemingly crazy $2.5 billion in revenue.
Doing that service well, is every bit as valuable as something like Twitter or YouTube. It's about communicating valuable information to an extremely large audience. Why shouldn't that be quite valuable?
It only seems trivial because the eg US and European media landscapes are well established / entrenched, the audience is stagnant (there's little to no growth in the news business in the US or Europe) and the consumers are relatively experienced at mass societal consumption.
Consider the value of portals to early US Internet adopters for one example of how this concept works. Why were AOL, Yahoo, Netscape's portal, and numerous other portal-like services, so frequently used and valuable back then (but no longer)?
A very large number of engineers were dedicated to building out the radio and television technology platforms over decades. Was it all just to deliver ads? Trivial then right? Well that's what paid for a lot of it. It delivered community, it delivered news, it delivered entertainment, it connected people to the rest of their nation.
Making it remotely accurate? Wiping out infectious diseases? Providing a billion people access to a healthy, nutritious diet? Saving the planet from ecological devastation?
I can think of a lot of very hard problems that have far more value than delivering advertisements packed into clickbait and fake news.
I'd agree with them, by the way. I don't think we really have that many solved problems. I'd consider that to be hubris and see many things that can be improved on, across the spectrum of ideas and implementations.
In fact, I'm hard pressed to think of much of anything that is a solved problem. Most everything can be improved.
You might want to find ways to optimize it form non-technical aspects, such as, how to get more users, how to write better titles, etc. But there's nothing that is technically challenging about it.
I'm sure there are even more technological advancements that can be made - and I suspect there always will be.
I'm not saying that it is currently ineffective, just that it isn't solved - meaning that there are still solutions to improve efficiency and efficacy. I actually see 'solved problem' as a kind of defeatism.
In reality it's mostly just dark pattern marketing.
But, yeah, it can be used for nefarious purposes. In fact, it probably will be. Hidden under that will be good uses.
I suspect there's going to be constant innovation. There are people who thought that personal transportation was a solved problem back when we rode animals. These days, we are looking at an EV revolution and SDV somewhere in the not-too-distant future. Along the way, it hasn't been a solved problem, even though it looked like it was.
I guess that's what I've been clumsily trying to say.
As engineers, wouldn't it be cool if the most valuable thing we could do was building tools that are inherently valuable instead of valuable because of the tool's ability to connect users with someone who wants to buy their attention?
You know, build some software that doesn't make you feel like a pimp.
Use it, block ads, pay for content...sleep better?
At the very least, corporations and capitalism give us a productive place to put sociopaths (the alternative is religion, healthcare, government, exile/six feet under). And more communal economic systems seem to work well until the anti-social types take over - North Korea was actually better off than South Korea for awhile after the war and the anti-social types always do take over.
Capitalism does a really good job of making it easier to do more with less. My phone is a weather station, a flash light, a calculator, a camera, a camcorder, etc. and it's cheaper than most Cameras were just 30 years ago. On the flip side, a lot of the materials that make my phone come out of conflict zones and I'm sure that my phone funded some warlord's attack helicopters and that's not great and it's unfortunate that the 'past of least resistance' involves such unsavory things but the solution rests with more capitalism - the warlord needs to demand a higher price or operate the mines and figure out how to build a phone and go legit.
That's false. There's a pretty strong correlation between outspending and winning elections. The losing side usually spent less. In aggregate, much more money is spent winning elections than losing them.
eg: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2014/04/04/th...
A lot of money is wasted on lost elections. I did say "equal", but my point was a lot of advertising dollars fail.
Barney Frank: "If the voters have a position, the votes will kick money's rear end any time. I've never met a politician-- I've been in the legislative bodies for 40 years now-- who, choosing between a significant opinion in his or her district and a number of campaign contributors, doesn't go with the district."
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/461/t...
And there's probably a belief that people will like the bills after it passes. Just as a lot of 'conservatives' eventually came out in favor of Obamacare (like McCain), I'm sure a lot of people would admit that they like Obamacare-lite more than Obamacare. Self-interested politicians might think that the bills would be more popular once some people saw their health care burdens drop. And I don't think they're wrong, the healthy people who make Obamacare possible stand to gain the most under the Republican healthcare proposals - the young, the wealthy, the healthy.
Half the country votes and half the country votes GOP, a 25% approval rating can translate to near-universal approval in a political faction.
In the 2012 US Presidential election (seems the data is not yet available for 2016), an estimated $7B was spent in total by all candidates and private groups. This is about $21.54 per person.
For comparison, in the last Canadian federal election, the top 5 parties combined received $127M in funding (public + private contributions). This amounts to about $3.60 per person, about one sixth as much on a per capita basis.
Google? Facebook?
>> Toutiao is on pace to pull in about $2.5 billion in revenue this year, largely from advertising. It was just valued at more than $20 billion, according to a person familiar with the matter, roughly the same as Elon Musk's SpaceX.