I actually read a paper book about telecom architecture and topology. It made the point that there's really only one product the only thing that changes is how you pay for it: do you buy the gear? Do you lease the gear and pay for the hookups? Do you lease everything? Do you pay someone to fix it? If you look at it, you're buying "connectivity" and paying for it in seven different ways.

Adobe is apt. They used to sacrifice 80% of sales to piracy. But then, they also used to charge $1100 a year to upgrade from CSx to CSy. Now they're at $50 a month. The people who aren't using Creative Cloud aren't paying for it when they're not using it, sure - but the people who can't afford $1100 a year (every year!) are much more likely to pay $50 when they have a gig, fire up their software, spit out the project and cancel their subscription until next time which means Adobe gets $50 (or $100, or $150) instead of $0. Piracy has dropped to something like 15%.

Autodesk finally did a similar thing. 85% of the instances of AutoCAD in the world were pirated, and they were all lightly used. So they decided they'd rather give away free versions of Fusion 360 that you have to pay for if you actually start making serious money with it.

The model has become "have a client? Pay us money" which seems to work for every creative I know. In contrast, Facebook and Google are at "you're never going to pay us money ever, so we're going to have to take value from you." And if you're going to take something, it best be something your victim doesn't know the value of.

Unfortunately it's something you don't really know the value of either, nor do the people you're selling it to. So everyone assumes it's worth nothing until it's all gone.