Digital Media Oligarchs Trap Internet Users to Maintain Influence and Power Online

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My affinity for the Internet began in elementary school when my mom let me use her Microsoft desktop to play fun and educational games online. “How cool!” I thought when interesting game options popped up in Google’s search engine, even though it took forever for these results to load. My love for the Internet increased when I signed up for my first social media account, Facebook, as a preteen to interact with friends outside of school and timed landline phone calls. By high school, Internet engagement became my most frequented pastime. This habit intensified in my 20s. With readably accessible entertainment, family, friends, news and world knowledge at your fingertips, it is difficult to not like the Internet, right?

Media scholars, however, argue that the Internet is an inequitable, digital battlefield. On this battlefield, media oligarchs effortlessly battle their opponents to maintain dominance, while small media companies fight hard just to stay alive. The worst part is that Internet users are the weapons these digital firms use in battle. The attention — or affinity — that tech giants gain from their consumers allows them to control the online world, including the Internet users who help them remain oligarchical rulers. In other words, the consumers of big tech companies are pawns in a war for high digital advertising revenue. It is this revenue that allows media oligarchs to keep their influence and power. So, how do we diminish online oligopoly? Well, like every issue, you must understand its formation and effects to solve it.

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Media and public affairs scholar Matthew Hindman comprehensively explains how media giants, like Google, Meta, Amazon and ByteDance, become oligarchs in the online world through his book, “The Internet Trap.” In the book, Hindman reveals that tech giants use a strategic tactic, known as stickiness, to consistently obtain the attention of Internet users. Audience attention from stickiness is the reason media oligarchs own more than 73% of the digital advertising industry, which is worth over $600 billion as of 2023.

A myriad of stickiness techniques is created every day, but the most prominent include fast-loading content, high-quality computing and storage services, personalized content and recommendation systems, attractive website design and structure, easy online navigation, daily production of mass content, bundle offers and strong social components online (eg. direct messenger, video calls, content sharing). Consequently, advertisers primarily invest their money in media oligarchs, so their ads can reach these tech companies’ massive online audiences.

Although certain elements of stickiness appeal to different niches within a media oligarch’s audience, they have one commonality — high costs. Tech giants spend billions of dollars every year to achieve stickiness. The expenses of stickiness, however, are manageable for media giants because the more loyal consumers they acquire, the cheaper it becomes overall.

Small media companies, such as local online newspapers, unfortunately, do not have the same purchasing capacity. Unlike media oligarchs, local digital news organizations lack robust budgets to achieve stickiness. This results in low advertising revenue. Local online news outlets that decide to adopt stickiness do not equip the tactic thoroughly because of inadequate resources. These local, journalistic challenges leave media professionals without jobs and their news organizations with little to no influence or power over their target audiences.

For years, communication scholars, media professionals, economists, political scientists and policymakers have been trying to find effective ways to regulate media oligarchies without much success. So, are Internet users and small media companies doomed? Not yet. In the wise words of Hindman, “If the Internet destroys local news, or subverts democracy, or ushers in a new gilded age, this is not the inevitable result of natural laws, but the consequence of human choices.” We still have time to change the control obliviously or leniently given to media oligarchs during the war for high digital advertising revenue.

Internet users should become informed on how media oligarchs trap them through stickiness for financial gain and social dominance to curtail their subjugation to it. Small media companies must decide to form sustainable, symbiotic relationships with tech giants. Meanwhile, lawmakers need to enforce harsher regulations without the risk of loopholes. Only then can the Internet transform into an egalitarian field, without battles, over time.