How do we pay for the information?

Posted by Alexander Ginzburg on September 2, 2007
Filed Under Advertising |

Money I can think of two primary means of payment for information: The first way is a direct compensation for its usage. We do that every time we pay for a book, the cable TV, or the college tuition. The second option is to pay indirectly via advertisement; it’s customary in commercial TV, radio and also the Internet. Consumers make the payment by exposing themselves to advertising. As opposed to the first way, the exact price of that exposure is not obvious. One could think that it allows him to enjoy the information virtually for free, but he’d be dead wrong. Advertisements make us pay in several manners: firstly, there is a Public cost to its existence; secondly, it costs us on a personal level. I’ll talk about each one of those costs in my next posts. Besides that, I’ll try to show that watching advertisement in exchange for information is more expensive and unfair than paying for it directly.