Sources
Where the material came from, how sources were ranked, and what was excluded on principle.
The source hierarchy
Six tiers, ranked. When a claim can be sourced at a higher tier, use the higher tier; when only a lower tier exists, the book says so at the point of use with a marker.
| Tier | Level | What it is | What it is good for |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Primary and first-hand | Operator dashboards, platform documentation, vendor pricing pages read today, statute and regulator text. | The only tier that can carry a cost or a verified term. |
| 2 | Reference documentation and standards | Model cards, license terms, training papers, adapter documentation, regulatory timetables. | Stable and checkable, which is why it outranks any market report on the same subject. |
| 3 | Published measurement with a stated method | Spend analyses, surveys, and platform reports that name a sample, a period, and a method. | Where the most-cited and least-trustworthy figures live. Carries a marker at the point of use. |
| 4 | Reporting | News that an event happened and when. | Establishes that something occurred; a primary source for the same fact wins. |
| 5 | Aggregated community knowledge | Forums, chat communities, and video walkthroughs. | Valuable for failure modes the vendors do not publish. Never the basis for a cost. |
| 6 | Vendor marketing | The selling company's own description of what it is building. | A source of claims and of direction, not of fact. Marked at the point of use. |
What was consulted, by type
Named by type rather than by link, because the links rot and the categories do not.
Named by type rather than by link, because the links rot and the categories do not. A URL that resolves today and returns 404 in eighteen months is worse than a named category you can search for yourself. Most of the numbers in this book are checkable in five minutes by anyone willing to open the vendor’s own page, and that is the method being taught.
- Platform documentation and creator terms revenue share, identity verification, permitted and prohibited content, enforcement practice
- Regulator and legal material advertising disclosure, AI transparency timetable, image rights, data retention
- Vendor pricing and model documentation image, video, voice, and compute
- Model and training documentation identity conditioning, adapters, dataset preparation
- Published measurement marketing spend and audience perception, all marked where the report sits beside a vendor
- Operator-reported figures posted with a dashboard, a payout statement, or a month-by-month breakdown
- Practitioner communities and video walkthroughs read for the failure modes, not for the numbers
- Price and policy pages read once, dated, and marked
Excluded on principle
Three things were excluded on principle: unnamed "studies show" with no sample, any revenue number lacking a denominator or a window, and material presented as leaked or confidential.