Re: Micropayments and publishing on the internet
Greetings Pen 'ellers, Joanna asks, Very interesting, but is it true? I thought Apple was making some kind of money on selling tunes over the net??? me, Shirky writes indirectly in a general sense about how to consider Apple's latest net music business. His point being that media is being undermined that someone else makes that we can't directly connect to them through that media content. Apple seems to be taking the road toward they control distributing music which people will pay for, but how long can that last? One has to stifle the general population making more and more interesting stuff to keep Apple in business with a product that one can't make a group come together with. Here is how he writes about publishing in this essay from this link: http://shirky.com/writings/weblogs_publishing.html Shirky, One obvious response is to restore print economics by creating artificial scarcity: readers can't read if they don't pay. However, the history of generating user fees through artificial scarcity is grim. Without barriers to entry, you will almost certainly have high-quality competition that costs nothing. This leaves only indirect methods for revenue. Advertising and sponsorships are still around, of course. There is a glut of supply, but this suggests that over time advertising dollars will migrate to the Web as a low-cost alternative to traditional media. In a similar vein, there is direct marketing. The Amazon affiliate program is already providing income for several weblogs like Gizmodo and andrewsullivan.com. Asking for donations is another method of generating income, via the Amazon and Paypal tip jars. This is the Web version of user-supported radio, where a few users become personal sponsors, donating enough money to encourage a weblogger to keep publishing for everyone. One possible improvement on the donations front would be weblog co-ops that gathered donations on behalf of a group of webloggers, and we can expect to see weblog tote bags and donor-only URLs during pledge drives, as the weblog world embraces the strategies of publicly supported media. And then there's print. Right now, the people who have profited most from weblogs are the people who've written books about weblogging. As long as ink on paper enjoys advantages over the screen, and as long as the economics make it possible to get readers to pay, the webloggers will be a de facto farm team for the publishers of books and magazines. Joanna continues, Now here is the internet and that possiblity is realized, but it seems that the sheer volume of stuff would minimize the chance that such a poem could be found. I mean, what would I google for: truly great love poems? There is also the truth that a lot of people want to read/be aware of stuff that is pre-selected, vetted by some market or other authority. This puts them in the know. In a sense, the growing internet space, polarizes even further the chaotic but free from the pre-selected but costly cultural product. So how would this affect our notions of what constitutes culture or value in art? I guess the time has come to write the seminal essay on Art in the Age of the Internet ...an updated version of Bejamin's Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Doyle, I surmise from Shirky and it seems also to follow from what you write above that what is likely to emerge is a culture of group connection emerging out of a fast growing chaotic increase in media production. The impact of something like that seems very light right now. There are some novel group processes here and there. Some successful in a tentative way, like these discussion lists, but the ability to use our media to undergird a shift toward group formation is very hazy right now. I have some thoughts that I want to work on myself. Some massive gathering like the Burning Man in California given to some sort of collective image making process seems apt. What could that look like if the tools were much more powerful? How could a whole lot of people find a way to massively work together toward some large scale process that is breaking through to what is just being hinted at now? To summarize to me Shirky proposes and I think he is right that the group process is really what the internet is enhancing. That is where the development of production and the culture is going to head toward and undermining the business model for traditional culture. Print culture started several hundred years ago, and the media of group connection is just getting started. We have to find a way to make it work for us (the left) in our own terms now. Just finding people to do something with is a big chore right now. Very hard work to knit together group activity. Where is the appeal? Try to figure out why Burning Man took off for example. There is a disconnect between what we are familiar with in forming groups, face to face, and somehow using the media to form groups in more powerful ways. Enough people trying will make it
Re: Micropayments and publishing on the internet
Very interesting, but is it true? I thought Apple was making some kind of money on selling tunes over the net??? As for creative types preferring fame over money. I think there is a lot of truth to that. Take poets for example, they wouldn't make that much money from traditional publishers anyway; so the prospect and attraction of having one of your poems on everyone's lips and in everyone's consciousness is great. One of the greatest English poems is by anonymous/ 14th century: Western wind, when wilt thou blow The small rain down can rain... Christ, that my love were in my arms, And I in my bed again. I remember thinking once that if I were capable of writing something this beautiful, I wouldn't care if I got credit or money for it...providing people just got a chance to read it. Now here is the internet and that possiblity is realized, but it seems that the sheer volume of stuff would minimize the chance that such a poem could be found. I mean, what would I google for: truly great love poems? There is also the truth that a lot of people want to read/be aware of stuff that is pre-selected, vetted by some market or other authority. This puts them in the know. In a sense, the growing internet space, polarizes even further the chaotic but free from the pre-selected but costly cultural product. So how would this affect our notions of what constitutes culture or value in art? I guess the time has come to write the seminal essay on Art in the Age of the Internet ...an updated version of Bejamin's Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Just thinking out loud here...but the other huge internet topic would be Political Organization and Information in the Age of the Internet. I'm off the read a book about the Zapatistas -- perhaps that will have some clues. Anyway, thanks for the article. Joanna Doyle Saylor wrote: Hello All, Clay Shirky caught my attention about a year ago. Shirky thinks about the economics of the web. In this case Shirky considers why micropayments wouldn't work. He takes into account exponents of micropayments like Scott McCloud. One facet of Shirky's claim is that content on the web is not tied to the form. For examples the current music industry, and the current movie industry tie their production to a form. CD's etc. We buy the form, and the content comes along. Shirky can be found at Shirky dot com. Doyle Fame vs Fortune: Micropayments and Free Content First published September 5, 2003 on the Networks, Economics, and Culture mailing list. Micropayments, small digital payments of between a quarter and a fraction of a penny, made (yet another) appearance this summer with Scott McCloud's online comic, The Right Number, accompanied by predictions of a rosy future for micropayments. To read The Right Number, you have to sign up for the BitPass micropayment system; once you have an account, the comic itself costs 25 cents. BitPass will fail, as FirstVirtual, Cybercoin, Millicent, Digicash, Internet Dollar, Pay2See, and many others have in the decade since Digital Silk Road, the paper that helped launch interest in micropayments. These systems didn't fail because of poor implementation; they failed because the trend towards freely offered content is an epochal change, to which micropayments are a pointless response. The failure of BitPass is not terribly interesting in itself. What is interesting is the way the failure of micropayments, both past and future, illustrates the depth and importance of putting publishing tools in the hands of individuals. In the face of a force this large, user-pays schemes can't simply be restored through minor tinkering with payment systems, because they don't address the cause of that change -- a huge increase the power and reach of the individual creator. Why Micropayment Systems Don't Work The people pushing micropayments believe that the dollar cost of goods is the thing most responsible for deflecting readers from buying content, and that a reduction in price to micropayment levels will allow creators to begin charging for their work without deflecting readers. This strategy doesn't work, because the act of buying anything, even if the price is very small, creates what Nick Szabo calls mental transaction costs, the energy required to decide whether something is worth buying or not, regardless of price. The only business model that delivers money from sender to receiver with no mental transaction costs is theft, and in many ways, theft is the unspoken inspiration for micropayment systems. Like the salami slicing exploit in computer crime, micropayment believers imagine that such tiny amounts of money can be extracted from the user that they will not notice, while the overall volume will cause these payments to add up to something significant for the recipient. But of course the users do notice, because they are being asked to buy something. Mental transaction costs create a minimum level of inconvenience that cannot be removed simply by
