The battle for consumers’ attention

TWO ENTERTAINMENT TITANS dominated the charts for the last few months of 2016: the mighty Walt Disney and Ryan, a five-year-old boy. Disney’s blockbuster films topped America’s box office in nine of the last ten weeks of the year. Ryan’s YouTube channel, featuring his parents’ daily videos of him at his home in California, was the site’s most watched in America for the last 20 weeks of the year. Most of his audience is made up of children in his own age group, gleefully looking at him unboxing and playing with toys, some of them from the Disney empire.

The internet has made the lottery of stardom available to anyone with a smartphone. This allows for a few random individual winners like Ryan, whose parents have earned millions of dollars from advertising on the channel in a couple of years; or for an everyman in China’s rustbelt to become a live-streaming celebrity. But the real business of entertainment is about owning one of the handful of digital platforms that can command consumers’ attention, including the one that made Ryan a star.

That is why Google’s purchase of YouTube in 2006, for $1.65bn, and Facebook’s acquisition of...