[saurik]

The worst case outcome of this (which I think is useful to mention, but maybe it is obvious) is when another company manages to think through all of that and "succeeds": figuring out how to monetize their product in a way that actually seems like a fair value proposition to all parties if you think through this, but instead totally fails because there is some website offering the same service "for free". If users cared enough to think through the business models of the companies involved, they'd realize how doomed the second company's model is, where the best case scenario is that one day they log in and they've pulled a Scibd, and that they should probably not be willing to use a free service, but instead they just go with it, get angry when it either collapses or starts monetizing, and them glom on to whatever the next "for free" version is. :(