The sellable product that Big Tech sells is aggregating and ranking billions of pages of content somebody else produced, so when you type a few characters into

The sellable product that Big Tech sells is aggregating and ranking billions of pages of content somebody else produced, so when you type a few characters into a search box, the most relevant results show up in few milliseconds. The ability to do that turns out to be more valuable than the actual content being read if measured by a typical ARPU of Big Tech vs ARPU of News co. One of the problems of course is that Big Tech then does not actually sell this valuable product but chooses to monetize it with ads instead, which did democratize access to information, but also incentivized creation of huge quantities of low quality information and misinformation (again mostly for the purpose of monetization with ads). Whether we are better off as a society is another question.