Thursday, September 10th, 2026
Advertising spent a century building a comparable unit so that two buyers could argue about price instead of arguing about what they were buying. Creator deals never got one, and every negotiation still starts from nothing.
Telematics programmes offer a genuine saving to drivers who qualify, which necessarily means the pool left behind is paying what it actually costs.
Software companies spent a decade giving away a usable product to build a funnel. The economics of that giveaway changed when the marginal cost of a free user stopped rounding to zero.
For a widening set of manufacturers, the machine is now the customer acquisition cost and the maintenance agreement is the business. The shift is rewriting how these companies are valued.