[bobloblaw45]

Huge problem in the creative fields.

Almost everyone is super hyped that someone finally likes their work enough that they actually want it, let alone actually want to pay for it. So they undervalue their work and sell it for peanuts. I sometimes see work priced so low that it barely covers the supplies. They might sell a few but don't want to raise their price as they get better. Get a few people doing this and it becomes hard for legitimate creatives to sell their work at higher realistic prices.

Then there's overseas creatives. Some can do phenomenal work but you just can't compete with their prices even if they're pricing realiatically for where they live.

[jjeaff]

It's sort of the reverse side of The Greater Fool Theory in economics. Not sure if there is a term specifically for this, but it definitely causes a lot of irrational business decisions even outside of creatives.

I used to have a pretty successful business buying products at the monthly USPS lost mail auctions and reselling them online.

But a bunch of bloggers picked up on the opportunity and started hawking it as a get rich quick scheme. So people started showing up and way overpaying for things because there was so much competition. People were paying more for things like Macbooks than you could buy them new at Best Buy.

The first few times I saw it happen, I thought, well, this won't last, these fools will lose their shirts on all this and never come back. And I was right, people rarely came back a second time. But for months and months, new fools would show up and repeat the same exercise and never come back. After more than a year of that, we couldn't afford to keep going regularly. But for years kept checking back periodically and I saw no sign of prices going back to anything reasonable.

Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.

[bobloblaw45]

Oh yeah I had family that did something similar. They did that whole thing where you bid on abandoned storage lockers. They actually did quite well considering how you can't rummage through everything prior to bidding. Made a small profit for a few years.

Then the TV shows came out and that put an end to that for them. Bids were too high that it wasn't feasible anymore.

[jacquesm]

'Race to the bottom' is the term I think you are looking for.

[plasticchris]

I think this is a problem for android apps as well. People are used to free or 99c, so charging a fair price for the effort put in is a non starter.