You're right. Selling latency may be more reasonable. Certainly cheaper for a creator.
Useless bytes have a few properties however. You can do more silly things with them. People like to do something unreasonably silly from time to time.
You can treat useless bytes as virtual goods. You could serve: unicode code points, animal names, or even sentences from public domain books. Then people can explore the catalog and have a tiny bit more personalized experience, than just buying 40ms.
They can also serve as a manifest against ads, because they are honestly useless bytes with a safety hatch.
Useless bytes have a few properties however. You can do more silly things with them. People like to do something unreasonably silly from time to time.
You can treat useless bytes as virtual goods. You could serve: unicode code points, animal names, or even sentences from public domain books. Then people can explore the catalog and have a tiny bit more personalized experience, than just buying 40ms.
They can also serve as a manifest against ads, because they are honestly useless bytes with a safety hatch.