Is your 2 Cents Worth Millions?

The internet has reached a threshold where your ideas and opinions can be worth millions. Many companies already see this value and work hard to collect your 2 cents. Almost every service call I have made this year resulted in a request to fill out a survey. Jack n’ the Box offers a chance for a prize. Every piece of junk mail you receive cost the sender over a dollar. How much would it cost for you to instead sit down and listen to a sales pitch. Would you do it for sixty dollars an hour? A short pitch to clean your carpet and the reason for your answer; you have no carpet? What about a review of your last restaurant meal in exchange for it being free? A free meal for your review may sound like too much, but what if a hundred people eat there because of it. Your review of a movie, book, or product may only be worth two cents, but if it networks out to enough people that can translate into hundreds of dollars. A really funny joke could be worth thousands. Readers Digest has known this for years. Yahoo has a layout problem with some of their pages since switching to a Web 2.0 layout. I almost sent them the fix yesterday. The fix is fairly simple, but given the changes to Yahoo happened last year, it has eluded their programmers. I experienced the same problem a few years ago so there was no time involved in coming up with a solution. I would settle for a hundred dollars. This problem could cost thousands to fix in-house. The ragged look of the Yahoo pages could already have cost them hundreds of thousands of dollars. How much is that fix worth.