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Information Valuation - The Most Buck for the Bits?

Posted by Cliff on from the inflation-ain't-got-nothing-on-this dept.

Rational asks: "I've heard of Everquest accounts sold for upwards of a thousand dollars... Considering that what is actually for sale is just an username and password, which generally comes up to less than 20 bytes in total, this amounts to over $50 per byte. What are the most expensive pieces of information that you have heard of, in dollars per byte? Perhaps satellite pictures? The Human genome?"

5 of 505 comments (clear)

  1. Goat Sex by T3kno · · Score: 5, Funny

    Judging from the number of time's I've been suckered into looking at it, and that someone somewhere is paying for each of those views, I'll bet that the aggregate cost for Goat Sex is in the trillions.

    --
    (B) + (D) + (B) + (D) = (K) + (&)
  2. /. quick run down of expesnive info by bilbobuggins · · Score: 5, Funny
    Everquest Account (~20 bytes): $1500

    Business.com (~8 bytes): $5,000,000

    Natalie Portman's phone number (~9 bytes): priceless

  3. Re:The most value has got to be in passwords... by Telastyn · · Score: 5, Funny

    The winning lottery #.

  4. Re:Brand Naming by Pig+Hogger · · Score: 5, Funny
    My guess for most bucks for the bit would be in the field of Brand Naming. Companies pay naming firms tens of thousands of dollars to come up with new words like "Lucent", "Pentium" and "Infiniti".
    It is not that "easy"... Such names come attached with thousand-page long reports explaining in detail the market research behind the name.

    Some years ago, a friend of mine did a logo for a BIG company. The logo looks like a head with an ellipse going though it. It came about in a totally unrelated office, er, "event" (everyone was drunk) when someone was clowning and put an old UHF TV antenna around a bust of Lenin. Voilà, instant multi hundreds$$$$ logo.

    The hard part was then writing up all the bullshit to "explain" the newfangled logo...

  5. $10,000 for one bit (of chalk) by Krelnik · · Score: 5, Funny

    I've heard various versions of this story over the years, but the best link I can find attributes it to a General Electric engineer named Charles Steinmetz (1865-1923):

    One day a whole roomful of General Electric's most expensive machinery went out of order. By this time Steinmetz had retired, but the company's baffled engineers called him back as a consultant. Steinmetz ambled from machine to machine, taking a measurement here, scribbling something in his noteboook there. After about an hour, he took out a large piece of chalk and marked a large 'X' on the casing of one machine. Workers pried off the casing and found the problem at once.

    When the company executives got Steinmetz's bill for $10,000, they were reluctant to pay it. "This seems a bit excessive for one chalk mark," Steinmetz was told. "Perhaps you'd better itemize your charges."

    Within a few days, they received the following itemized bill:

    Making one chalk mark $1.00

    Knowing where to make one chalk mark $9,999.00