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Mozilla blogger bought 1 million Facebook entries (full name, e-mail) for $5

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Re: Mozilla blogger bought 1 million Facebook entries (full name, e-mail) for $5

#101

Post by 001sky »

notatoad wrote: post #100
TylerE wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're absolutely marginal costs, if you look at the right way. Takes more servers and fatter pipes to support 10,000 downloads a day rather than 500.

For something like a list of a million user names and email addresses? You put it on pastebin and set up a script to email out links to it when you get a Paypal payment confirmed email. The only cost is to acquire the data, once that is done, there is zero cost. If you want to talk in totally abstract terms, digital goods in general tend to have marginal costs associated with them. In the context of this discussion,…

Let N=(1000 items of unique information) Let W= (2000 items of unique information)

2(N) does not yield W, regardless of cost to copy (N).

To get W, you will need to do something more. This will not be cost-less. That's the more general case.

Re: Mozilla blogger bought 1 million Facebook entries (full name, e-mail) for $5

#102

Post by esrauch »

001sky wrote: post #94
notatoad wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those are costs, but they're not marginal costs. They have no bearing on the cost of each copy, nothing to do with scale.

Care to explain a bit more? On the face of it, I don't believe this can make sense. All costs scale, all costs are at some stage marginal. What are you proposing is the trigger or cause of incurrence?

I think the case they are describing is where the marginal cost is highly nonlinear and the price delta between two reasonable values is so negligible that the marginal cost isn't meaningful.

A 2MB file does not cost twice as much to email send to someone as a 1MB file; you aren't going switch to a different internet connection or email provider because of your file is twice as big. The first 1 byte is very expensive and every subsequent byte has no observable marginal cost until 20 orders of magnitude later.

Re: Mozilla blogger bought 1 million Facebook entries (full name, e-mail) for $5

#103

Post by 001sky »

esrauch wrote: post #102
001sky wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Care to explain a bit more? On the face of it, I don't believe this can make sense. All costs scale, all costs are at some stage marginal. What are you proposing is the trigger or cause of incurrence?

I think the case they are describing is where the marginal cost is highly nonlinear and the price delta between two reasonable values is so negligible that the marginal cost isn't meaningful. A 2MB file does not cost twice as much to email send to someone as a 1MB file; you aren't going switch to a different internet connection or email provider because of your file is twice as big. The first 1 byte is very expensive…

Appreciate your comment. I think I was unclear earlier in my post. Was not trying to talk about the supply of > undifferentiated bits per-se. Those are trivial to scale, in minor orders. The micro cost is in the acquisition of bit sets. In your example, its not the cost to send or replicate the e-mail with a 2 mb attachment. Its the cost to acquire, verify, etc the contetents of the 2mb file have any value. [1]

You can't create more data per-se by making X copies of the same data (in the sense of it having value for marketing/analytics). that is just monetizing existing data. ie, The marginal cost to relicate a set, provided it was given to you for free...just assumes away a non-trivial part of the equation....getting the data.

At scales of 100m to a 1Billion...is not trivial or costless. Lastly, if you only have one set of data (say 5m users of data), that is a finite supply. You could have 2 sets (10m users). Thats not the same as having 2 copies of 1 set (of 5 million). A customer might pay per user for a lead, but wont pay twice for two copies of the same info. now, if somebody shows up with 100s million, it might impact supply/demand (depending on comparabilit/uniquenss). But those differences cannot be assumed away at zero cost, imho. Hope this make more sense, was not trying to argue just for the sake of it.

________________

[1] That scales with data entry, etc (if nothing else) at the origin (ie, this is a FB user cost == per user). Even if its non-cash its ~$0.85c per 15 minutes of time for a western eurpoean ABC1, back of the envelope. And that scales linearly.

Re: Mozilla blogger bought 1 million Facebook entries (full name, e-mail) for $5

#104

Post by sirclueless »

001sky wrote: post #101
notatoad wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For something like a list of a million user names and email addresses? You put it on pastebin and set up a script to email out links to it when you get a Paypal payment confirmed email. The only cost is to acquire the data, once that is done, there is zero cost. If you want to talk in totally abstract terms, digital goods in general tend to have marginal costs associated with them. In the context of this discussion,…

Let N=(1000 items of unique information) Let W= (2000 items of unique information) 2(N) does not yield W, regardless of cost to copy (N). To get W, you will need to do something more. This will not be cost-less. That's the more general case.

That's not what marginal cost means to a supplier. The question isn't whether it costs more to acquire 2000 email addresses than it does to acquire 1000 email addresses, the question is whether it costs more to distribute to twenty buyers than it does to distribute to ten.

Thus, the cost of hosting is a marginal cost (probably zero in this world of pastebins and digital lockers). The fee taken by the payment processor is a marginal cost. The cost of finding twice as many emails is not.

Re: Mozilla blogger bought 1 million Facebook entries (full name, e-mail) for $5

#106

Post by rmc »

hkmurakami wrote: post #77
tvladeck wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't matter. The company that got the data then sold it on for $5, which gives us an indication of how much they had to pay [1] to get the data from FB in the first place. [1] I'm using "pay" loosely here. I have no idea what they had to give up or produce in order to get the data, but presumably FB received something of value.

I imagine this data came from the "allow this app to access XYZ of your information: YES/NO" thingy that pops up when authorizing apps on these social media platforms. The only payment to FB that I can think of would be in the form of marketing costs (or does FB have a developer membership cost like Apple?)

does FB have a developer membership cost like Apple?

No, it doesn't cost anything to create a Facebook app.

Re: Mozilla blogger bought 1 million Facebook entries (full name, e-mail) for $5

#108

Post by Permit »

mkjones wrote: post #95
Permit wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're pretty clever. When I started programming in 2009, I wrote a small scraper that would create accounts, friend people and steal their info if they accepted. (I never released it past my own friends list and never sold the data). There were the obvious checks for CAPTCHAs when too much activity was detected, but other subtleties as well. If you looked at too many people's profiles, emails wouldn't be displayed…

Glad you found our anti-scraping stuff to be neat! I work on the team that builds a lot of that technology at Facebook. Any interest in interning here sometime and helping us improve our systems even more?

You guys do a really great job.

To be perfectly honest, I've kind of fallen out of love with web development in the last year and have taken more of an interest in algorithmic trading. I appreciate the interest, though. :)

Re: Mozilla blogger bought 1 million Facebook entries (full name, e-mail) for $5

#109

Post by 001sky »

sirclueless wrote: post #104
001sky wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let N=(1000 items of unique information) Let W= (2000 items of unique information) 2(N) does not yield W, regardless of cost to copy (N). To get W, you will need to do something more. This will not be cost-less. That's the more general case.

That's not what marginal cost means to a supplier. The question isn't whether it costs more to acquire 2000 email addresses than it does to acquire 1000 email addresses, the question is whether it costs more to distribute to twenty buyers than it does to distribute to ten. Thus, the cost of hosting is a marginal cost (probably zero in this world of pastebins and digital lockers). The fee taken by the payment processo…

No, a "supplier" has to pay for all of his raw materials costs. That includes inventory costs as well as distribution. Of course you can always restrict your timeframe and assume away this cost (inventory as already incurred), but this is not true in the general sense. In particular, if this is true, by assumption, the there is a limited supply by deduction. If you increased your supply [of information bits, not duplicate bits], you would have to pay to incur inventory at that margin precisely. So you never have together zero marginal cost and unlimited supply, this makes no sense.

notatoad 1 day ago | link

I don't think that rule applies for digital goods where the cost of reproduction is zero. The supply is infinite.

To sum, "the cost of reproduction" is the cost of "supply", unless the supply is assumed fixed. Thus the second sentence does not follow per-se.

Re: Mozilla blogger bought 1 million Facebook entries (full name, e-mail) for $5

#110

Post by sirclueless »

001sky wrote: post #109
sirclueless wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not what marginal cost means to a supplier. The question isn't whether it costs more to acquire 2000 email addresses than it does to acquire 1000 email addresses, the question is whether it costs more to distribute to twenty buyers than it does to distribute to ten. Thus, the cost of hosting is a marginal cost (probably zero in this world of pastebins and digital lockers). The fee taken by the payment processo…

No, a "supplier" has to pay for all of his raw materials costs. That includes inventory costs as well as distribution. Of course you can always restrict your timeframe and assume away this cost (inventory as already incurred), but this is not true in the general sense. In particular, if this is true, by assumption, the there is a limited supply by deduction. If you increased your supply [of information bits, not dupl…

I don't think you are understanding. Of course there are big costs in acquiring more product to sell. The question is: Do you have to pay those costs for each customer, or can you pay them once and amortize the cost over many sales?

For example, Adobe Photoshop probably costs a lot to design. It has really high fixed costs, because you need to hire good developers and implement a bunch of advanced operations. However, once Adobe pays the fixed costs, the marginal cost of Photoshop is pretty minimal: packaging, printing a DVD, maybe some marketing. It still costs a lot because the fixed costs are so high, and there's not much competition.

Conversely, a plumber has relatively low fixed costs: a truck, some tools, and some training. But plumbers also cost a lot, and this is because they have really high marginal costs: they have to spend an hour at the house of each and every customer.

So I agree with you, there may be high costs in acquiring email addresses to sell. My point is that they are in no way marginal costs.

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