"Can You Be Taken Down As a Monopoly Just Bcs You're Super-Popular?"

I was reading about Eric Schmidt going before Congress in an quasi-anti-trust inquiry into Google's market status: Was it a monopoly? I thought: Well, it isn't charging for views, it's giving search away, and charging for ad space ... for advertisers to ride on that popularity.

About 2004, I noted that the cost of media ran 10x the cost of creative, in the advertising world. I don't know what it is today, or if it can be quantified.

About the same time, I paged through a copy of Rolling Stone while doing a project for a concepting seminar. The ads in the magazine weren't trying to sell much product -- they mostly asked people to join up -- in one case, to the Army, in another, to Yahoo. The trend was moving toward advertisers collecting subscribers to their own media channels, rather than selling directly from Rolling Stone.

But ads used to ride with content, as media was formerly framed. Now they ride with access to content. Then there's the idea, "If you aren't paying, then you are the commodity."