People <i>do</i> pay for advice, though. Financial advice in particular has an obvious unbundled market (not just in the form of &quot;your guy at the investment bank&quot;, but also in the form of stock analysis, industry reports, etc. Bloomberg terminals are pure &quot;advice&quot;, if you want to think of things this way.)<p>Slightly more murkily, though, we&#x27;ve got things like fashion advice, where you pay a &quot;fashion consultant&quot; who works with you to select clothes that work for you. You&#x27;ve also got &quot;personal trainers&quot; who curate your exercise experience. You&#x27;ve even got these things called &quot;doctors&quot; who don&#x27;t even have any medicine in their offices(!), instead just writing down their recommendations for medicine you <i>should</i> buy on a piece of paper! ;)<p>I think the uniting factor in all those cases where we <i>are</i> willing to pay for advice is that the advice is very &quot;interactive&quot;: the fashion consultant looks at how clothes fit on you, the personal trainer watches how well your plan is working out and keeps you motivated, and the doctor does a bunch of tests and schedules appointments at intervals for &quot;long-term outpatient treatment&quot; to make sure your medicine is working, adjust dosages, etc.<p>Meanwhile, it seems weird to imagine paying e.g. Netflix for the output of its recommendation engine, or iTunes for a generated Genius playlist; those are able to be created as batch processes from a bunch of data that already existed, namely your watch&#x2F;listen history. You might imagine paying for <i>the service</i> that provides that capability (like e.g. Spotify), but not for each piece of advice from it.