Re:Firefox Preview adds support for recommended extensions, ...
by shadowgovt on Thursday February 06, 2020 @12:04AM
(#22253558)
Agreed, but "And once that's covered" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that story. And if those pages that cost $0.000007 to run are contributing $0 to that cost, they are at the mercy of their patron and in no way in control of their own fate.
It's a tragedy of the commons if 100% of those pages think someone else is going to foot the bill and one day the system that is actually footing the bill for those pages changes.
As to marginal cost, I don't think you quite understand the term. Web servers are fixed costs. Hardware, setting up pages, electricity: all of that is considered a fixed cost. The marginal cost is the additional cost of producing one more unit of product. In this case, the actual cost difference between serving page 1,000,000 and 1,000,001. So, say 0.0007¢ in bandwidth for a modern, too-heavy page. Too cheap to meter.
It's true that the fixed costs have to get paid for, but there are plenty of ways to do that. And once that's covered, there is no tragedy of the commons. As long as the NYT has enough subscribers to pay their fixed costs and produce a reasonable ROI for their investors, they're golden.