Hi there, thanks for the feedback. The focus of the article was most certainly more of "how to extract value in creative was other than the most obvious: straig

Hi there, thanks for the feedback. The focus of the article was most certainly more of "how to extract value in creative was other than the most obvious: straight up paying for it with cold hard cash" (less so encouraging people to race to the bottom). I suspect most early stage pre-traction / pre-funding startups fail because they can't "monetize" in some way - hence the list of ideas. Certainly if you can't monetize, racing to the bottom isn't going to help. Differentiation of value proposition wasn't the topic of discussion either - but yes, I'm not a proponent of differentiating by price point alone. As for the example, Match and eHarmony certainly have "real" support costs too, and I did not say that POF did not. All three have server, bandwidth, electricity cost too. I'm not sure what your point is. My point with that example was that of those 3, POF has a different way of extracting value for itself (the central topic of the blog). I apologize if I sound defensive, I'm not. I thank you for the feedback and for challenging me to think through :)