Saturday, September 6, 2003

Fame vs. Fortune: Clay Shirky's well-written counterpoint to the idea that the time is ripe for micropayments. He makes some good points, but sets up my premium content as a straw man: "Would you buy a VR of the Matterhorn for 25 cents?" Why would anyone take a chance when they don't know who shot the VR? That's why most of the people offering BitPass content provide free sampler content as a demonstration of their art. Secondly my work has been around awhile, so over a million people (my guess) have seen my site. However "...and in many ways, theft is the unspoken inspiration for micropayment systems", and comparing micropayments to a type of computer crime seem like outrageous statements with no proof. His painting of a connection between micropayments and crime seems like the weakest part of his arguments. Is it that immoral to think that people might be willing to pay a small amount for an experience? I get comments from visitors to my site saying they feel they owe me something. I agree with the point that there is some threshold of granularity of content beyond which people do not want to be bothered by making a buy-or-not decision (a newspaper for $0.25 vs. buying each word). I think the argument can be made that there is a different granularity threshold for each type of media. For newspapers, it might be an article or section. Today you have the choice between buying a daily paper vs. subscribing to a month's worth. If there was some article in the NY Times archives that I really wanted to read, I'd pay a quarter for it, but have no desire to subscribe to any larger access to the archives. Where that granularity threshold lies is one factor whether micropaments are viable for a particular media. The success of pay-per-song music services like iTunes suggests that the granularity threshold for music is not a CD but a song, and that music is a fertile ground for micropayments. Clay makes some good points about the nature of weblogs and choosing fame vs. fortune. It's hard to see why people would pay money to read most weblogs, many of which seem analagous to finding a newspaper in the park that has been annotated with someone's comments, or some stranger's diary. While Clay goes on to make a distinction between content made by individuals vs. groups, I don't think it matters whether music, for instance, is made by a single person or a group. Is that a distinction that is visible and valued by most music fans? And would you pay more for group-music than solo-music? Another set of arguments Clay has used involved attacking public utilities as an example of markets where micropayments have worked before, because they are monopolies which have no equivalent on the Internet. More recently he invokes substitutability, the willingness to accept one thing as a substitute for another. However art is not a commodity like electricity or gas which is perfectly interchangable. If you are a fan of Scott McCloud, Ansel Adams, or the band Kush, the availability of free comics, snapshots, or music content somewhere else is probably not going to satisfy your affinity for those artists. Another point in Clay's article I would question is the assertion that incremental views of digital content don't cost the author/artist anything. If an artist gets one or 100 views a month, then there is no incremental cost. However Clay mentions the goal of many artists to be famous. What happens when a site becomes famous? There is a well known "success disaster" problem whereby a site gets slash-dotted and faces horrendous bandwidth charges. Some of these sites then go off the air because they have no mechanism to pay for the cost of fame. Suddenly you go from obscurity with no income to a site with fame and a negative balance for the bandwidth you incurred. Let's say I spent a good part of my life making something with more intrinsic value than a weblog. I'm sure I could spend years trying to make a CDROM product or get a book published with my panoramic photography, due to all the gatekeepers and obstacles to the non-famous, non-connected small artist. However anyone with a website, micropayment software, and a potential product could concievably bypass all that and reach the bulk of their audience. That seems worthwhile. I don't know the answer yet if people are willing to pay 25 cents to view a VR. Perhaps it will function primarily as a way for people to determine if they want to sign up for a subscription model. That is something which will take months or a year to discover. I do know that creating and offering gigabytes of quality panoramas of non-commercial places costs a non-trivial amount of real money. If the net-world cannot find a way to sustain small artists, many people's works will go offline and the internet will be poorer for it. 10:02:11 AM

© Copyright 2006 erik goetze.