Sunday, February 21, 2016

What's Your TIme Worth?

I was recently thinking about watching TV, or even YouTube, ads. I wondered how much my time is worth to watch or have to wait for these ads. That also got me wondering about the true ad revenue a video producer gets, per view. For YouTube, it looks like maybe $2 per 1000 views of your video, might be a generous estimate (http://www.tubefilter.com/2014/02/03/youtube-average-cpm-advertising-rate/). -see the comments of that link. If that's reasonable, that would be 1/5th of a cent that a video producer gets, on average, each time their video is seen. Now, based on calculations of some people's salaries, a reasonable, and easy to remember, thumb rule might be that your time is worth about 1 cent per second. So, if I had to watch 10 seconds of video ad, I wasted 10 cents worth of my time. Our time on earth is limited. It is valuable. Imagine if you only had one month to live, how you might become more aware of the value of your time. Does it not seem logical/reasonable to maybe pay something like 1 to 10 cents to watch your average YouTube video? Of course more production-intense videos, utilizing the talents of 100's of people (E.g. major motion pictures) might cost 100's more (Maybe 1-2 dollars). Not only could you eliminate all the admin costs associated with production and attachment of the ad, but a producer would be able to direct their content more squarely at what people actually want, rather than having to tailor it to be more related to what the advertiser wants to sell. I'm saying that the amount of useful content would increase. Think of all the tired, rehashed storylines and themes. -or all the crap generated by content farms,  regurgitating copied psuedoinformation, simply to create pages for attaching ads to. What about static content? -news articles, how-to's, blogs, etc. Why not give someone who provides information, that is useful and/or entertaining to you, a few cents? I'll tell you one reason why not. It's because some think that the transaction cost for such so-called "micropayments" is too high. It is thought to be too large of a proportion of the payment, itself. Credit card companies, PayPal, etc. can't make much off of micropayments. Some companies, like ChangeTip, are trying to give it a go, though. I really like the idea. It seems like it is really a solution to a problem that shouldn't be there in the first place. In the age of computers, and the internet, our currency exchange fees should already be tiny. So . . . I mean . . . what I'm really talking about is pay-per-view. That already is (was?) a thing cable TV providers had. But there we are/were talking about dollars per view. Here, I see it must be possible to get/produce content for pennies per view. Obviously that is currently possible, if advertisers have found a way to only pay 1/5 of a cent, per view.

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