BuzzFeed’s 19-year-old quizmaker will no longer work for free

And yet here they are, having lost that percentage of revenue because they had this mindset. I don't think she needed a six figure salary necessarily, but BF made exactly no attempt to do _anything_. Unlike an unpaid intern, McMahon could have kept doing this indefinitely, not just for three summer months.

But the larger point is that economically productive employees in their early career are almost always exploited, so it wouldn't have been hard for Buzzfeed to throw some relatively token amount towards her and have her be over the moon with it. Most college students would love to get $20k for doing something they were procrastinating and doing for free, especially if you package it with an ego-boosting title.

It's hard to make money for creative endeavors, for several reasons, and there are generally two ways to make money from them: put everything into it and hope for the best, or have a "real job" and do the creative thing on the side. Regardless, and personally-speaking, I prefer doing creative things for free because that's the best way to keep my interest-level high.

I'm glad I don't work for you.

(Although Marx would roll his eyes at the idea that pricing was based on the skill of the producer relative to her peers, and divorced from demand for the good.)

I severely doubt it's the case. Besides, businesses aren't typically interested in having a competitive market anyways. It's probably more profitable to not lower prices at all and lobby to make it harder for competitors to lower prices . . . or just conspire with major competitors to keep them higher. Both actions have a strong historical precedent in US markets, at least.

- You can keep headphones on and keep listening to a podcast without being rude to the cashier

- You can scan and bag stuff in an order that makes sense (e.g. so you don't get eggs at the bottom) at your own pace

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piggly_Wiggly#History

> At the time of its founding, grocery stores did not allow their customers to gather their own goods. Instead, a customer would give a list of items to a clerk, who would then go through the store, gathering them. This created a greater cost, and therefore higher prices. Piggly Wiggly introduced the innovation of allowing customers to go through the store, gathering their own goods, thus cutting costs and lowering prices.

> Customers at Piggly Wiggly entered the store through a turnstile and walked through four aisles to view the store’s 605 items sold in packages and organized into departments. The customers selected merchandise as they continued through the maze to the cashier. Instantly, packaging and brand recognition became important to companies and consumers.[5]

(It adds a little of discoverability and traffic, that is nice and useful in internal meetings, but it's not my main reason to use it.)

>Few would say Wikipedia is exploiting its users. Some may say that about StackOverflow or YouTube, but many would say it about BuzzFeed or the Huffington Post.

You may have answered your own question with your examples. Wikipedia isn't monetized at all. It relies entirely on fundraising. All the rest have some sort of monetization model which is built around the assumption that their users will generate free content that gives their platform its value.

On the monetization spectrum, though, I would say StackOverflow does much better than YouTube. It's designed entirely around providing value to its users, rather than merely selling their eyeballs (you can find lots of information about SO's approach to monetization here: https://stackoverflow.blog/2016/11/15/how-we-make-money-at-s...).

My personal spectrum from best to worst looks like this:

1. Funded by donations (sort of utopian and doesn't always work)

2. Funded by directly selling services/goods worthwhile to the community (pragmatic and mutually beneficial)

3. Funded by selling generic ad space to third parties (lazy as business models go, but newspapers have been doing it for centuries - this is usually a sign the organization doesn't have a well-defined audience: cf. Facebook/Youtube vs. Stack Overflow)

4. Funded by secretively profiling people and selling their personal information without telling them (just evil and gross)

As for platform vs. publisher, that's been an interesting topic in internet law. See for instance Cubby vs. CompuServe in 91: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubby,_Inc._v._CompuServe_Inc.

From wikipedia they get information, from the Stackexchange network - answers to questions that enable or improve their work or hobby; Buzzfeed's Justin Bieber haircut quizzes, however, do not provide any value to the users, apart from a tiny fleeting endorphin rush, maybe.

You started with exploitative commercial sites which "tend to have the same business model." Wikipedia doesn't belong on the low end of a concocted poll of "few---some---many" in that regard. It's a different class of service with a completely different governance, content licensing, software licensing, and log access model. Putting it there pretends those issues aren't vital to your set of questions.

Is BF designed so that Rachel naturally learns how the BF sausage gets made? Seems that a) she never had any interaction with decision makers at BF, b) she still has no way to deduce what inferences can be made when people click on BF quizzes, c) she had no access to the decision-making process at BF nor how her work affects to it.

The consequence of that is she was blind-sided by a set of ethical concerns. It was a tweet from a laid-off employee that first suggested her work may affect BF's bottom line and the livelihood of the people who worked there. The pipe that connected her with BF almost seems designed to have prevented her from ever facing any ethical concern whatsoever.