An addition to this rant about Instapaper, since I don’t want to keep cobbling revisions onto it, is that I think there’s a lot of irony here.

Instapaper has a subscription option, which doesn’t confer any additional benefits other than supporting Marco (to develop his iOS app, which costs money to download). Tech blogger Shawn Blanc has a membership model to support his (good) writing about Apple/iOS/tech geekery. The venerable Daring Fireball has a membership option, to keep (the very talented) John Gruber in clickety-clackety keyboards. Dan Benjamin’s 5by5 podcast network (which serves up Marco’s podcast, which set off this whole thing with me) just served up a podcast (Gruber’s) with 800,000 downloads last week. And he has sponsorships for all his (really awesome) podcasts. Oh, and one more thing: Apple has paid out $1,000,000,000 to developers for their work on the App Store. I know my examples are anecdotal, a bit cherry picked, but they do relate precisely to Marco and his audience and peers. It seems like these iOS/Apple developers know how to make some money.

I’m not saying any of these people don’t deserve massive financial success for their great talent and hard work—all of which I enjoy, all of which I support financially. But don’t tell me that non-tech-geeks don’t deserve to get paid.