I don't understand why it is currently #1 on HN. In newspapers it surely doesn't cost them much more to put your ad in bold. Probably less than a cent. But hell yeah they will charge in the thousands if the newspaper happens to be WSJ weekend edition real estate section.

Obviously, you pay for the amount of eye-balls seeing that ad. Changing the color may result in thousands of people more seeing the ad. The cost is in the know-how to get these thousands of eye-balls to see your content. Not for the color.

Without a platform as hugely popular as 37-signals the programmer could change colors all day long on his 'localhost:3000' and that wouldn't be worth $800. That would be worth $0.0.

The premise of the article is completely false.