>> Why don't you actually read some of the BuzzFeed news: http://www.buzzfeed.com/news

I did. Sorry to tell you, but they seem as "hard news" as CNN. It is infotainment. Most of the topics are still about what is popular, what can generate clicks and what can polarize. There is nothing in there that I feel I would pay to see investigated, studied or analyzed.

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The point I am trying to get across is that any kind of business is supposed to exist to support some kind of need for society. The "advertising industry" only fulfills any social utlity when it manages to efficiently connect producers to their target consumer.

If to do that, it needs to steal attention from people, it is not doing its job properly.

If the "advertising industry" ends up providing a system that makes people consume only things from the producers with more capital, instead of the best product, then the industry is not doing its job properly.

If the "advertising industry" ends up creating by collateral a huge mass of well educated people that depend on this "meta-work" of producing content that can be pass for journalism or entertainment, then it fails to fulfill its social function.

>> Wikipedia isn't a business, but their business arm Wikia makes all their money on advertising.

Society benefits from something like wikipedia. I can donate $25/year like I do to Wikipedia, and hope that enough people will contribute to it to keep it running. Good thing that Wikia can bring some funds and not have to rely on many more people. But if Wikia ceased to exist, people can still find ways to keep wikipedia around. If society loses wikipedia, we would lose a lot.

Now, if for some reason Wikia was not being profitable, do you really think society would be worse off? Perhaps for historical and cultural reasons, it would be bad to lose it - just look at all the work from the archive.org people. But look at Geocities: do you think society is that worse off without it? Would we be worse off without Wikia?

>> Eyeballs = attention = what advertising is all about.

To come back to my point: I do believe that there are cases where business manage to provide the social function of advertising (establish a communication channel between producers and consumers), but this "produce content and try to monetize it" with ads is not one such case.

- The content that gets produced is of dubious quality (because the focus of the content producer is not in the quality of the content, rather how much of the people's attention it can grab)

- There is no real connection between content producer and the producer paying for ads. So content producers may end up becoming crap-pushers without even knowing.

- It makes for an uneven field for smaller producers. We live in an era where the cost of producing, processing and distributing information is almost zero. The balance of power could be completely in favor of the people. We HAVE the means of production of wealth in our hands. But because of advertising, we give this power back to the Capital owners. You describe your work as a "marketing platform for top brands". Let me tell you one thing: I WANT BRANDS TO BE DESTROYED. There is no real value in brands, except for the brand owners. They stiffle innovation. They created consumerism as a lifestyle.

I am all for free-market and minimal intervention on business. But you state a equation like this one where "attention" as something that can be extracted value from WHEN IT IS NOT FUCKING YOURS! It is immoral and you don't even see it.