What Are Eyeballs Really Worth?

No, I'm not talking about the black market for human body parts!

In this case, I'm talking about the eyeballs that look at the things we create online. Could be essays, could be videos, could be blogs, could even be tweets or memes.

Historically, the value of eyeballs have substantially depended on large numbers.

On pretty much every platform I contributed to that offered some sort of compensation to creators (prior to Hive), it was all a game of numbers. And typically, it required thousands and thousands of pairs of eyeballs to look at your content before it was considered to have any value at all.

These days, the idea is that web 3.0 is going to change that, although I am not entirely sure by what mechanism.

Now, I can understand a model where eyeballs start to have greater value if you have some sort of subscription scheme. What I'm struggling with is this idea that something that has previously been worth maybe a few dollars per thousand eyeballs suddenly is worth $0.50 per individual pair of eyeballs. Or something like that.

The page view didn't magically become worth 100 times what it used to be. Well, maybe it could if you are OK with hyperinflation... then you can say that!

I'm only half joking there.

Historically speaking, revenue based models have shown that eyeballs are not worth a whole lot of money. The thing I always end up questioning is this idea that eyeballs suddenly are worth a lot more... based on nothing in particular. Maybe they're worth more simply because we say so and we give you more.

Whereas that is fine and dandy for the recipient, perhaps in the short term, but how is it sustainable?

Using myself as an example, the moment I encounter some kind of "paywall," I tend to just click through to somewhere else. I can't imagine I'm unique!

Pretty much everything in life has to come from somewhere.

When you eat a steak for dinner, it didn't just appear out of thin air like magical Unicorn dust... it came from a cow and there was a whole line of the people involved in bringing you that steak to your table, and it's likely that steak didn't appear on your table until you'd forked over $10 a pound for the meat.

Certainly pretending that the steak is free simply because somebody says "steak is free" is certainly a nice idea but how does it become sustainable? Where does the perpetual supply of free steaks come from?

As far as I know, the cattle still has to be farmed somewhere.

Of course, web content is not steaks, but you still have to come up with the appropriate value somewhere.

Thanks for stopping by and have a great Sunday!

Comments, feedback and other interaction is invited and welcomed! Because — after all — SOCIAL content is about interacting, right? Leave a comment — share your experiences — be part of the conversation! I do my best to answer comments, even if it sometimes takes a few days!

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Created at 2024-07-07 01:33 PDT
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