Quote:
Originally Posted by Jaime_Astorga
I know. But if we go by prices, then can we agree that "advertisement" is much cheaper to someone using google than, say, a $12.99 subscription to use the service? Pirate books aren't free, either, then, since to get them one has to pay for bandwidth and probably visit a site with ads, yet the point stands.
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As you say, it depends on what it cost you to get to that site.
The thing about advertisement-subsidizing is that it socializes content cost. Maybe you didn't directly pay for it... but the next guy did, when he responded to an ad and bought something. And maybe you responded to an ad and bought something, thereby paying for content someone else perused.
But all of that is essentially spreading the costs among multiple coffers... IOW, you pay for it indirectly. And in most cases, those distributed indirect costs, if they were capable of being isolated, tend to be more than the direct cost. But since it's spread over enough people to bring individual costs way down, and most people don't intuitively make those connections, it
seems as if it's cheap or free to the individual, and consumers are thereby placated. Just one of the psycho-socially-engineered ways in which content is paid for.
For the record, though, a pirate site may collect money, or at least cost you money to access, but
absolutely none of that money will go to the creator.