Micropayments will fail. Four years ago, Clay Shirky wrote about micropayments
http://www.openp2p.com/pub/a/p2p/2000/12/19/micropayments.html which could ... reward creators of text, graphics, music or video without the overhead of publishing middlemen or the necessity to charge high prices. However, as Shirky pointed out ... users want predictable and simple pricing. Micropayments, meanwhile, waste the users' mental effort in order to conserve cheap resources, by creating many tiny, unpredictable transactions. That is the problem with micropayments. There is a minimum mental transaction cost .... Put another way, Beneath a certain price, goods or services become harder to value, not easier, because the X [payment] for Y [good] comparison becomes more confusing, not less. Users have no trouble deciding whether a $1 newspaper is worthwhile - did it interest you, did it keep you from getting bored, did reading it let you sound up to date - but how could you decide whether each part of the newspaper is worth a penny? Was each of 100 individual stories in the newspaper worth a penny, even though you didn't read all of them? Was each of the 25 stories you read worth 4 cents apiece? If you read a story halfway through, was it worth half what a full story was worth? And so on. When you disaggregate a newspaper, it becomes harder to value, not easier. By accepting that different people will find different things interesting, and by rolling all of those things together, a newspaper achieves what micropayments cannot: clarity in pricing. As for solutions, ... the real world abounds with items of vanishingly small value: a single stick of gum, a single newspaper article, a single day's rent. There are three principal solutions to this problem offline - aggregation, subscription, and subsidy - that are used individually or in combination. .... In addition, as Shirky says in http://shirky.com/writings/fame_vs_fortune.html for information goods, like writings, some people are ... more interested in attention than income ... [for such people] free makes sense. ... as the drunks say, you can't fall off the floor. Anyone offering content free gains an advantage that can't be beaten, only matched, because the competitive answer to free -- "I'll pay you to read my weblog!" -- is unsupportable over the long haul. Free content is thus what biologists call an evolutionarily stable strategy. .... -- Robert J. Chassell [EMAIL PROTECTED] GnuPG Key ID: 004B4AC8 http://www.rattlesnake.com http://www.teak.cc _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l