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Comment by WWLink | Hacker News Reader

^ this is the best explanation I've seen so far in the thread.

Software translates directly into money. The company I work for makes physical devices - they have all kinds of engineers, but what we're making goes directly into making the company money. Like I can straight up say, they make millions off the stuff we produce for them.

If your work makes the company a lot of money, it's not frivolous to ask for a small chunk of it lol.

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one could also say that tech companies get an unjustified amount of the money that should go to the journalists through their capture of ad networks.

It's hard to say whether it _should_ go to journalists. Even before the digital era, newspapers largely made money through advertisements, not subscriptions. They were monetizing eyeballs just as much as the Facebooks or Googles of the world do. In their case they brought in the eyeballs through their content (whether responsible journalism or tabloid-trash) and monetized them through also showing ads to the same eyeballs.

The difference is that journalism no longer has a pseudo-monopoly on the kinds of things they historically did (content, distribution, eyeballs etc.).

My grandfather read the whole newspaper every morning. In one day I think I read a LOT more content than him but it is spread over a wide variety of surfaces, print, websites (no single author) etc.

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