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Appreciate your comment. I think I was unclear earlier in my post. Was not trying to talk about the supply of > undifferentiated bits per-se. Those are trivial
by 001sky 14y ago
Appreciate your comment. I think I was unclear earlier in my post. Was not trying to talk about the supply of > undifferentiated bits per-se. Those are trivial to scale, in minor orders. The micro cost is in the acquisition of <unique> bit sets. In your example, its not the cost to send or replicate the e-mail with a 2 mb attachment. Its the cost to acquire, verify, etc the contetents of the 2mb file have any value. [1]
You can't create more <valuable> data per-se by making X copies of the same data (in the sense of it having value for marketing/analytics). that is just monetizing existing data. ie, The marginal cost to relicate a set, provided it was given to you for free...just assumes away a non-trivial part of the equation....getting the data.
At scales of 100m to a 1Billion...is not trivial or costless. Lastly, if you only have one set of data (say 5m users of data), that is a finite supply. You could have 2 sets (10m users). Thats not the same as having 2 copies of 1 set (of 5 million). A customer might pay per user for a lead, but wont pay twice for two copies of the same info. now, if somebody shows up with 100s million, it might impact supply/demand (depending on comparabilit/uniquenss). But those differences cannot be assumed away at zero cost, imho. Hope this make more sense, was not trying to argue just for the sake of it.
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[1] That scales with data entry, etc (if nothing else) at the origin (ie, this is a FB user cost == per user). Even if its non-cash its ~$0.85c per 15 minutes of time for a western eurpoean ABC1, back of the envelope. And that scales linearly.
- esrauch 14y agoThanks for the reply; I honestly am not sure about this situation in particular, I was mostly trying to explain how the statement about marginal costs can be true in any scenario. I didn't actually intend to say that the cost here is mainly bandwidth or X for any X. My point is more than it can be true that the marginal cost of anything can be so many orders of magnitude less than the non-marginal cost for certain ranges that it isn't worth considering. Data sets based on facebook profiles almost certainly come from people approving shady apps or someone set up a crawler in a way that is able to get a lot of information before being detected as a crawler. In either of those scenarios, the person who set it up effectively paid a flat upfront cost and ends up with X number of users, and there are no linear costs (no manual verification or paid data entry at any point). They cannot spend half as much time and get X/2 users or even maybe X/100 amount of information. In practice they could spend more time getting more users to give access to their random app, but the marginal cost function is just insanely nonlinear; its effectively 0 at some places and probably tends towards infinity an order of magnitude higher than that.