same asset, two buyers
Start with the asset. Not the app, not the ads, not the stock. The asset is the pile: two decades of people writing down what happened to them, in public, under handles, with other people voting on it and arguing back. Every day it gets bigger by however many people had something happen and posted about it.
Two very different buyers show up for that pile.
- needs
- fresh human text to train on and to ground answers in
- pays with
- licensing deals, in bulk, by contract
- needs
- a human check after the model answer
- pays with
- time and attention, one thread at a time
Buyer 1: AI companies. A model needs text to train on and text to ground answers in, and it needs that text to be human, recent, and dated, because training on model output makes the next model worse. Labs have paid for exactly this: the data licensing deals with Google and OpenAI are the visible part, and the public debate over whether those deals renew higher or lower is the price discovery. From the lab's side, the pile is fuel. They buy it in bulk, by contract.
Buyer 2: normal people. Someone asks a model a question, gets a clean answer, and does not fully trust it. So they open a second tab and look for the humans. Not for the summary, for the lived use: the side effect, the thing that broke, the "don't". From the user's side, the pile is the check. They consume it one thread at a time, for free, and the ads sit next to them.
Labs pay for fuel. Users come for the check. One dataset, two demand curves, and the second curve is what keeps the first one honest: if users stop showing up, the pile stops growing, and the fuel goes stale.