One of my favorite anecdotes regarding the oddity that is the media business appears in the early pages of Googled, Ken Auletta’s story of the early days of the media business’s uneasy collision with tech. In 2003, Mel Karmazin, then C.E.O. of a still-swaggering Viacom, visited Larry Page and Sergey Brin and learned how they’d built what was basically a perfect marketing engine that matched advertisers to users based on their expressed intent. His blunt reaction: “You’re messing with the magic.” (He didn’t say “messing,” but in the interests of optimization, I’m reluctantly censoring myself to improve email deliverability. Life is full of compromises.)

The media business was indeed built on magic, the ability to manufacture the whiff of exclusivity, quality, and cultural cachet that turns a piece of communications or entertainment into a valuable product. In the media business, every publisher assures you that they are premium. I never in my career heard someone describe their content as “second rate” or “filler” or “stuff they show at dentist offices.” After all, who’s to say, really?