Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Its also not clear for example that Studio Ghibli lost by having their art style plastered all over the internet. I went home and watched a Ghibli film that week, as I'm sure many others did as well. Their revenue is probably up quite a bit right now? This sounds like a rewording of "You won't get paid, but this is a great opportunity for you because you'll get exposure".
Exposure has value! The meme around trying to pay artists with exposure is because some people think their "exposure" has meaningful value when they are offering to expose the artist to 100 people, 99 of whom aren't likely even target customers. Studio Ghibli on the other hand had exposure to millions of people (maybe hundreds of millions), and probably >5% of those were potential customers. So yes, being paid in exp…
There's a lot of ifs in here. The number of people exposed to has an estimate that covers two orders of magnitude, "maybe". "probably". "greater than". "potential".
In order for this exposure to have more value than the ownership of the original, all of those things need to fall into place. And no one can offer meaningful exposure based on the off-chance that a meme goes viral. All the risk is on the creator, they lose control of their asset and receive a lottery ticket in return.
> So yes, being paid in exposure makes sense, if the exposure is actually worth what the art is worth. But most people offering to pay in exposure are overvaluing their exposure by 100x or more.
Yes, but that's a big "but"; it's difficult to know the value of the "exposure" that is being offered, not to mention if the entity offering it is legit or if it's just a scam because they don't want to pay.
Additionally, the AI companies who are slurping up copyrighted works to train their models are not offering exposure. And the mememaker who happens go viral can't offer it either.