“Build something useful, and people will attached a dollar value to it. It’s not that hard, it’s just painful to think about.”

Wrong. Your very comment is proof. Your comment is very valuable. Useful, even! You have said exactly what I think. You fufillied a niche. Yet I’m not paying you a single penny for that content. The dollar value for your content is simple: zero. I cannot attach any dollar value other than that. If you charged money to read that content, I would have looked elsewhere and found another, similar comment, and praise that instead. I’m sorry. I really am.

The barriers to entry, the various gatekeepers and curators has been there for a reason. Without them, you will only have a flood of content, a flood that devalues all content altogether. It turns out that even ‘good’ content is cheap. And it’s cheap because of people like you, who have willingly wrote brilliant content for free, so that people like me can “freeload” off them.

I don’t know of a good solution. But building content without a solid plan for monetization is a fool’s errand. The problem is that I’m a fool, and wrote this comment, in anger that ultimately, everyone loses.