But if content is paid to consume then the price immediately drops to 0.
If there is a singer that sells his music for free, and one that sells it for 1$, given that there is competition and they will be similar in quality, everyone will prefer the free stuff.
Nobody is willing to pay for something trivial, even if the producer has put tons of work in it. The value is set by the market not by the content creator.
This is why all content creators use 3rd party monetization tools, otherwise they would all go broke. Nobody is willing to pay 10$ for a youtube video, but if they see a nice T-shirt there they might buy it for 10$, and the producer gets a comission from that.
So it's not a problem about valuation, but the fear that the market would value abundant content like videos to 0$.
But you're forgetting about the subscription model... Netflix, Spotify, Amazon Kindle Unlimited, the government. You have to pay taxes anyways... so why not allocate your taxes to the public goods that you value most? I'm already subscribing to Netflix... so why not allocate my fees to the content that I value most? It's not like I'd save money by allocating my fees to less valuable content.
Imagine if Steem switched to the pragmatarian model. Maybe each month we'd all have to pay $1 dollar.... but we could choose which stories we allocated our pennies to. Why not allocate our pennies to our favorite stories? We'd all be able to easily find and read the most valuable stories. The most valuable writers would be compensated accordingly. We'd be giving them an incentive to continue writing valuable stories.
If most members of Steem allocated all their pennies half-way through the month... then this would mean that the fee could be increased to $2 dollars per month. A larger pie would attract more writers to Steem.... there would be a larger supply of more valuable stories... which would attract more readers. A larger pool of readers would be able to support a greater variety of niche topics. It would be a virtuous cycle.