Is the news going to become a $5 trillion industry? No. That would be one-third of the US economy. Could the news become a $500 billion industry? No. All advertising spending in the US comes to about $170 billion a year, and only a small portion of ad money goes to news organizations.
He is applying some arithmetic to Marc Andreessen’s claim that the news business will grow by a factor of 10 or a factor of 100 over the next couple of decades. Internet Bubble 1.0 was also vulnerable to arithmetic, as I pointed out in July of 1999 (i.e., when the bubble was inflating).
Speaking of the Internet news bubble business, Tyler Cowen points to the soft launch of vox.com.