I’m not sure “pay what you want” will really work for most people
But I do think the following all work:
Pay something so I can keep making stuff (Eg patreon, kickstarter)
Pay for VIP access (Eg private streams)
Pay for real-time access (Eg super chats)
Pay for early access to new stuff (Eg memberships)
Pay for a physical item (eg overpriced merchandise)
The point remains the same --
If you can restrict access, then the price people will pay is the maximum they are willing to pay for that access.
If access is unlimited, they will pay as little as they can get away with it, factoring it intangible things like paying a symbolic fee to "clean their conscience".
Very well said ser
The key is to find something where access is limited by the laws of nature, because charging a premium for that is not exploitative by definition
And with things that can be infinitely reproduced and that have infinite supply, like content or more generally information, where making a copy costs nothing and does not restrict anybody's access to the "original", one can't even talk about property rights.
So, if you make infinitely reproducible information, in any form - an image, a text, a movie, a song, software... - freely accessible, people have even less incentive to pay for it, because the fact that they use it and copy it and distribute it, does not prevent you from accessing it anyway. In other words, they are not "stealing" anything from you.
