<story><title>Paying top employees the highest salaries in the market</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-09-24/in-battle-for-talent-one-startup-founder-tries-unlimited-pay</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>wmeredith</author><text>Top talent... selling advertising... for a news aggregator. Sigh.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>adventured</author><text>&amp;quot;Toutiao is on pace to pull in about $2.5 billion in revenue this year, largely from advertising.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;If the media landscape isn&amp;#x27;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&amp;#x27;s an amplified benefit to aggregation &amp;#x2F; managing all of that information. Which explains the seemingly crazy $2.5 billion in revenue.&lt;p&gt;Doing that service well, is every bit as valuable as something like Twitter or YouTube. It&amp;#x27;s about communicating valuable information to an extremely large audience. Why shouldn&amp;#x27;t that be quite valuable?&lt;p&gt;It only seems trivial because the eg US and European media landscapes are well established &amp;#x2F; entrenched, the audience is stagnant (there&amp;#x27;s little to no growth in the news business in the US or Europe) and the consumers are relatively experienced at mass societal consumption.&lt;p&gt;Consider the value of portals to early US Internet adopters for one example of how this concept works. Why were AOL, Yahoo, Netscape&amp;#x27;s portal, and numerous other portal-like services, so frequently used and valuable back then (but no longer)?</text></comment>
<story><title>Paying top employees the highest salaries in the market</title><url>https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-09-24/in-battle-for-talent-one-startup-founder-tries-unlimited-pay</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>wmeredith</author><text>Top talent... selling advertising... for a news aggregator. Sigh.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>sdfgelgh43oito3</author><text>news aggregation, and the selective targeting of individuals for advertising might just be the most powerful social influence today. Wins elections even...</text></comment>