Of course, there is also the possibility that the actual market value of a lot off "content" is zero. In those cases, deriving your revenue from advertising distorts the market.
I don't think its a fallacious viewpoint... although you are right that there are few alternative options in this case.
Generally people want to get the best value for their money - free things are the positive extreme of good value for money... and whilst people will pay more for something that is better than the free version, this is often a very small proportion of those who will use a free version. at least based on my real world experiences from working on apps that have both free and paid versions...
away from the extreme this logic is obviously faulty though. i've seen many cases where /raising/ a price increases the volume sold... which completely baffles me.
He accentuates some research as the be-all, end-all authority on the matter. Of course it is a valid argument to point out that a study can be fabricated to give arbitrary conclusions.
Yeah, I would more or less agree with "people in general don't want to pay for content that they can easily and legally get for free with non-obtrusive ads."
Why would we need to do that? If Google (and all of its advertising-based competitors) disappeared tomorrow, something like YaCy[0] would take over. So many business models that exist today based on advertising and central hosting could be replaced by decentralized, peer-to-peer, free software projects. The main thing limiting these projects right now is lack of interest due to the non-profit property.
