Corporations bootstrapping their own community spaces, branded journalism, etc is historically common; the reason for not doing that comes down to cost and conv

Corporations bootstrapping their own community spaces, branded journalism, etc is historically common; the reason for not doing that comes down to cost and convenience. It saps away attention from the primary line of business to invest in a genuine, highly-engaged space like that, and it's much easier to look for platforms with a generic ad slot to insert messaging into. But the past decades of outsource-and-automate, attaching the brand to new tech companies as they appear, has largely passed; if all the existing spaces have become unproductive sources of eyeballs, you have to change course and come up with a way to make "mcdonalds.social" an attractive hangout instead. The only reason centralized social media got as far as it did before was because the capital markets footed that bill.