The problem is that the carries (for the most part) aren’t willing to let the money they made off this go. Sure, you can buy your phone elsewhere, you can go off contract, but that monthly bill you get still has the cost of handset replacement integrated into it, so that upgrade credit you get every two years is just…

No, the only thing my hypothetical relies on is the assumption that anything worth consuming is worth a non-zero amount of money to consume. The presence of lots of content you don’t want to consume has no effect on the value of the content you do intend to consume, which is the only factor involved in the valuation.…

In the first part of your argument, you seem to be implying that a diverse set of content with a non-zero valuation will somehow come out a a zero valuation. Since you’re not required to watch the videos that don’t interest you, I don’t see how you could make this argument.

Again, I agree with you that if you give…

I have some degree of sympathy for this guy. Perhaps he, like me, grew up in a family without very much money, and he looked at maids the way I used to: people who lighten the load for you around the house (in exchange for money of course). It wasn’t until I met (and married into) a family that had more money that I…

Exactly, now if you work from there and start asking yourself: would you pay 2 cents? What about a penny per year? Two pennies per month? Eventually you’ll reach the point where you really would say no, this is the actual non-zero valuation of the content.

Just to be clear, you are saying that if YouTube said that, in order to access the same content you have been watching, you would have to pay them a one-time cost of one penny (not per video, a lifetime one time cost for all their content), you would say “no” and happily never watch a YouTube video again, because the…

No, it’s you that has an outdated understanding of valuation; where the smallest unit of payment is $0.01 and the act of paying require time and energy. The new economic models of micro-valuation and micro-transactions, allow consumers to effortlessly pay the tiniest fractions of a penny for content. We no longer have…

I’m looking for a response where you explain how you can value content at $0 and still watch it. When it comes to valuing a web video, I can’t see what parameters you would use to come up with a value other than you desire to watch it. If your desire is non-zero, the value should be non zero. If the value is zero, you…

Yeah, that’s pretty much the only response you have left at this point, isn’t it?

Hey, if you want to argue that $10/month isn’t the right price point you can totally make that argument. As long as you don’t make the argument that the content you are watching is actually worth $0/month, but yet you are still watching it, I think there’s lots of room for debate.

My time is worth money too, and every time I lose 30-120 seconds sitting thru unskippable ads that’s MY time that’s lost.

That’s actually why a subscription model makes sense; you can check out a new content creator and if you don’t like it, you haven’t paid anything extra. I watch new content all the time on Netflix, and I don’t mind that some of it isn’t for me. You can guess how often I buy a new video off Amazon just to see if I like…

So, people should be on the honor system to pay their content producers if side step the regular funding mechanism? Obviously I have no idea what you do for a living, but would you go for getting paid through a system like that?

You’re arguing that it’s okay to side-step the traditional funding source and pay content creators directly, if you feel like it. That really is the difference between paying a cover to see a band, or telling that band to play for tips. Which do you really think makes more money for the band?

If everyone who side…

I keep seeing a lot of people responding that a better way to support content creators is just by donating money directly to them. I see the logic of cutting out the middle man, but this is a pretty crazy argument that essentially boils down to “we expect YouTube producers to work for tips.” We have this view of…

I keep seeing some form of this argument on every thread about YouTube red. I don’t know why so many people feel that some professions should have to work for tips, and others don’t. What’s special about YouTube producers that you think they should only get paid by people who feel like paying them, and everyone else…

Woah woah, I think we need to nip this in the bud. The only way this autonomous car thing is going to work out is if we all agree to pretend that everyone else isn’t masturbating in their cars. The sooner we all agree not to dispel that illusion, the better.

Seriously, the whole point of driver-less cars is that you can focus on something other than driving while in transit. I would take it a step further and say that I specifically want it to take some amount of time and effort to transition to manual driving mode (maybe even require the car to be stopped) because the…

An RTS/Action hybrid is actually a really good idea; but this isn’t quite the way it should go. That super-popular vein of AAA titles like Call of Duty and Battlefield would really benefit from an RTS interface where some player control the allocation of resources (vehicles, spawn points, etc) and assign tasks to FPS…

If someone intentionally side-swiped a car, they wouldn’t get attempted murder. Why should he get a more serious charge because the other guy decided to ride on a less safe vehicle?