Does a landlord on a literal physical market take 30% of revenue? I find that unlikely.
How did we arrive here, where supposedly ‘efficient’ digital marketplace is a form of rent higher than actually building physical rent, and expenses on wages and materials for a typical business?
Ad platforms too are fundamentally about letting someone perceive ROI lesser than their real ROI, for your own benefit. For me, it falls under the same category as all of the above - zero productivity endeavours.
Maybe we should go back to the previous millenium and make usury illegal. Should fix all of these problems, albeit in a nuclear fashion.
Which is why market makers like Google quietly work very hard to discourage, prevent, interfere or buy their competition.
This also neglects the fact that the programmatic market routes billions of dollars intended to be spent on real media (ad placements on real news websites etc), to fraudulent mobile apps and websites and bot traffic.
Serving the ads is probably much more expensive than serving the news site, since there is a ton of heavy algorithms to determine what ads to show.
Total costs for each depends on how much it costed to make the news article so is hard to say.
Static text is much cheaper than dynamic content. News isn't anything that couldn't be served out of a .txt or sqlite CMS.
News providers seem wholly uninterested in providing anything better and actually competing with better content providers
One where the market maker is taking up the cost of providing a market. E.g. Steam takes a 30% cut for providing the infrastructure required to distribute games. Some people/companies can do it for less but it is the best option for a majority of sellers.
If the market maker did not the seller would get more revenue but would also eat the cost directly instead of paying someone else to do it.