I understand the economics. But if you look at firms like USV, you'd have to imagine that the dealflow from Fred & Albert's blog/twitter is worth at least $1,000 per hour. So it's not like the opportunity to create valuable permission assets doesn't exist in the marketplace, it's just that companies aren't willing or (more likely) able to invest in capturing those. This seems like a possible market failure to me.
There are actually tons of examples in that general vein. For example, CEOs regularly write books that their companies use as marketing tools because they're believed to (at least indirectly) bring in sales by positioning the company as a thought leader in some way. "Advertising Value Equivalent" is even used as a marketing metric for such things whether or not it's a good one.
But that doesn't mean that this can be replicated by just having a freelancer pretend to be writing as the CEO. (Though PR folks, editors, etc. help with such projects.) And even when books are largely ghost written for celebrities and such, the ghost writer is still just going to collect a fairly modest word rate.
> But that doesn't mean that this can be replicated by just having a freelancer pretend to be writing as the CEO.
The freelancers can just write under their own names. Mathematically, people who can create substantial value by creating high-end content who are also CEOs must logically be a subset of the total population of folks who can create valuable high-end content. So you would expect at least some market for high-end content creation, but nothing like that actually exists.
Right now there are a handful of individuals who have landed one-off gigs doing this, but there isn't any sort of marketplace.
>So you would expect at least some market for high-end content creation, but nothing like that actually exists.
There is. It mostly exists in the form of subscription newsletters and paid research reports of various types. Specific examples include subscriptions to IT industry analysts such as Gartner. (Typically subscriptions include personalized services in addition to reports.)
In general, this has become a much tougher gig outside of a handful of large firms--because of all the competition with free content.
I already run a publishing platform that allows folks to turn email conversations into blog posts, the idea being to get the same benefits as blogging but with 10x less work. E.g. here is something that was just published today:
