The thing about unpaid content is that you have no market signal about its true value. We know Avengers can bring in X ticket sales + Y movie purchases + etc.

The thing about unpaid content is that you have no market signal about its true value. We know Avengers can bring in X ticket sales + Y movie purchases + etc. But what's a million YouTube view video worth? The actual content value is important because it tells you what people are willing to do to watch it. If you over-ad something that people are only watching because it's free and doesn't have ads? I'm guessing that doesn't end well.