There are three independent concepts:  cost, use value (I usually abbreviate this as &quot;value&quot;), and <i>price</i>, or exchange value (which <i>you</i> are terming value).<p>There&#x27;s rather more discussion of this in economic litereature than might be expected, both early (pre-Smith and 19th century) and contemporary.<p>Trying to make all three of these agree is a bit of a problem.  Economic orthodoxy variously tries to do this &#x2F; pretends they do (and mind, &quot;agree&quot; != &quot;equal&quot;).<p>Content has cost.  There&#x27;s time and effort necessary to create it.<p>Content has <i>value</i>.  It can improve, even drastically change, the lives of those it reaches.  That cost may be <i>negative</i> as well -- disinformation or distraction, for exaple.<p>What content <i>doesn&#x27;t</i> have much of is <i>exchange value</i> -- it&#x27;s difficult to draw walls, fences, boxes, or whatever else it is that prevents free access -- around content such that people should <i>pay</i> to get it.  And doing that ... has its own sets of problems (generally: under-provisioning of content, particularly to the economically disadvantaged).<p>Advertising essentially hijacks one content stream (that the <i>audience</i> seeks) with another (that the <i>producer</i> wants distributed).  Advertising has value to the <i>author</i>, not <i>audience</i>, and so the <i>author</i> is willing to pay for it to be disseminated.  This ... produces numerous perverse incentives.  Crappy Web pages among them.<p>But claiming that no <i>market</i> value (exchange value &#x2F; price) means no <i>use</i> value, or no <i>cost</i> basis, is simply false.  Common, but false.