Success Quote by Joichi Ito

Ito’s line is a calm prediction with a sharp edge: the internet doesn’t just change how messages move, it changes who pays for attention. “Marketing” here isn’t a department; it’s the tax you pay to be noticed when the audience is fragmented, skeptical, and one click away from ignoring you. As “the Net gets stronger,” supply explodes: everyone can publish, everyone can sell, everyone can perform. That abundance makes distribution cheaper, but it turns attention into the scarce resource, and scarcity is where prices rise.

The neat inversion - delivery down, marketing up - smuggles in a broader critique of the mass-media era. In the old model, distribution was the moat: printing presses, broadcast licenses, shelf space. If you controlled the channel, you controlled the market, and marketing rode on top of that concentrated reach. Ito is describing the moat draining. Digital delivery trends toward near-zero marginal cost, so advantage shifts to branding, targeting, influence, and data: the machinery that “manufactures” demand rather than merely shipping product.

There’s also a warning embedded in the optimism about networks. A weaker mass media doesn’t automatically mean a more democratic culture; it can mean a more competitive, algorithmically mediated one, where the winners are those who can afford to constantly buy, optimize, and game visibility. Ito, a longtime internet insider and institution-builder, is naming the new power center: not the truck, tower, or storefront, but the ability to command attention in a crowded feed.