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Comment by htrp | Hacker News Reader

>Rates vary by buyer and content type, but Braga said companies are generally willing to pay $1 to $2 per image, $2 to $4 per short-form video and $100 to $300 per hour of longer films. The market rate for text is $0.001 per word, she added.

This is high enough that there should be a market to compensate the end users who created these

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> The market rate for text is $0.001 per word, she added.

I'm astonished that a picture turns out to be worth a thousand words.

I love this fact! I would have never realized it

These are probably pretty arbitrarily priced so someone thought they'd be cute & everyone else picked up this rate.

I don't think market prices usually work this way. Am I missing a reason that this is an exception?

I would think classical mechanisms of price determination don't really make sense when there's a brand new market: customers don't know how much things "should" cost and businesses can't make decisions via comparison to competitors. So there is some arbitrariness in setting the initial prices - you can't do market research without an established market.

This is especially true with these data brokers, since it's not like "cost of materials and labor + a profit margin" makes sense. In this particular case data is more like a new commodity than a manufactured good.

Do you really think that market prices are going to reflect such a popular adage because a picture really is worth 1000 words? Does this kind of pricing differential get reflected in the salaries of journalists vs photographers? No? Then as someone else said it's a new market with an artificially "for lolz" initial price that competitors are blindly copying to avoid having to do their own price discovery. I'd expect this to shift & correct slowly over time unless it's a cute joke that everyone appreciates & the true price is close enough that no one cares enough to differentiate in that way.

On the other hand, per byte the word is more expensive

I’m an economist. This is an example of a volume discount. Prices often decrease per-unit when buying larger quantities. That happens whether it’s milk or the square-footage of an apartment. I’d expect larger files to be worth less per-byte. Photo and video files tend to be larger than text ones.

Top multimodal models have about 200-1000 tokens per image, so the math works out.

There is a market...to compensate the platforms where creators uploaded the data for free.

If you give something away when it's worthless, don't come back for more when it's discovered to be worth more.

Users of these sites have had license agreements and privacy policies for a long time, and freely gave away their content just because free web hosting was worth it. Why would they be entitled to anything more now that this content have found new value?

There was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datacoup , which tried to create a market, but they ultimately went under and the brand is now used by an unrelated company.

Are certain types of textual content more valuable than others? For instance, conversations vs long form content vs short form (ie tweets)

Are counterfeit words then AI generated? Just like money you need a very good “press” and hard to detect..

With what's happening in the EU with the GDPR on one hand and with the DMA on the other, I wouldn't be surprised if this becomes the new business model for social media companies.

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