In short, over the 1980s MTV was in the enviable position of selling advertisements off the attention captured from what were, essentially, advertisements in another form. Its costs were therefore limited to things like rent, paying its executives, and the young people, the "VJs," who introduced the videos. The latter were cheap, too—salary was less than $30,000 a year, but there were perks like doing cocaine with rock stars during the MTV New Year's special and other experiences beyond price. The combined effect of these favorable conditions meant that MTV defied the usual laws of gravity operative in most media businesses. By the mid-1980s, it was easily the most profitable of all the new cable networks.

Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, loc. 817