Although, I don’t pay for much [I'm on a budget *cough*cheap*cough*] and don’t necessarily have to because I have that wonderful AdBlock extension for Firefox which gives me the ‘paid for feel’.

And you said ‘whilst’. I love that word. It’s one of my favorites, although I couldn’t tell you why…

I was interested to read giddings’s link about Radiohead’s pay-what-you-want experiment. As to Jane Siberry/ Issa’s pay-as-you-see-fit policy, her Wikipedia entry says this:

In an interview with The Globe and Mail, Siberry confirmed that since she had instituted the self-determined pricing policy, the average income she receives per song from Sheeba customers is in fact slightly more than standard price.[3] [4]

Footnoes are to the articles whence this came, but she also says as much on her website. Here are her most recent stats:

Pricing Statistics

% Gift from Artist 20%
% Standard 17%
% Pay Now 5%
% Pay Later 56%

Avg Price/Song $1.26

% Paid Below Suggested 6%
% Paid At Suggested 78%
% Paid Above Suggested 16%

$1.26 (US dollars) compares favorably with the average song price of $0.99 at iTunes.

Obviously, the cost to the reader of most “vanity press” type blogs, as this one is, is $0.00. (The cost to those of us who produce them: domain name registry, if we do that; webhosting, if we do it off the site of our blog software; internet access, to the % that we use it; any other subsidiary services like Flickr to hold and transfer the images, etc.) The cost readers pay to get at the mildly subsidized ones (i.e. those that run ads) is the price of filtering out, or graciously (gratuitously) clicking on the ads. Obviously that’s a price most of us pay to live in the USA and every developed country on Earth. The New York Times sets aside some of its content as for subscribers only, but I get their Sunday paper and I STILL haven’t figured out how to access the “subscribers only” content. So it festers, unread by me at least.

By the way, Chumpy: the rights to the unauthorized, bastardized, downsized version of The Sound of Music would rightly go to the Mother OutLaw, who wrote it. The market for that thing is VAST and UNTAPPED, man. She could do that to every beloved family musical, for the purposes of puppet shows & birthdays and the like, and make a MINT. It’d keep her in tofu and herbal tea for the rest of her born days. I’ll talk to her about it.

The value or worth of your writing and pictures is so much more than pounds and pence (or dollars and cents). To me, more precious for not being overtly commercial in any sense.

These comments are misplaced: I think you’ve sold the rights to your previously described, remake-version of ‘The Sound of Music’ for MEGABUCKS…….!