What you say the article is missing is the whole point of the post. This is not a programmer way of looking at it on the whole. In fact, I think the goal of this post is to change programmers "way of looking at it'". 'this is only three lines of code' is a programmer's viewpoint. But it is only a hook into the post to grab programmers and then the post goes on to shift to a practical, business viewpoint. (this post changes the programmer's view point who reads the post)

In terms of

'People don't pay for highlighting, they are paying for more traffic from an ad Ultimately, they are paying for all the other stuff on the website that gets people to show up, view ads and click on them.'

Uhhh dur. And the post even addresses this:

' There are a lot of lessons one can learn from this anecdote: the art of the graceful upsell, the underlying value of 37Signal's brand/traffic that lets them charge $200/month for a glorified <li> element. '

Note, "the underlying value of 37Signal's brand/traffic".