but these are subscriptions, not pay-a-few-cents-per-view where the payment is so small that you should not care. it's like paying per sms. i think except maybe for high earners, people do care and prefer services that don't charge in an uncontrollable way.
pay-per-view for movies works because it contrasts with buying the movie on a dvd or going to the cinema. but the same is not true for reading webpages like news articles (which is the most obvious use for micropayments)
the idea behind micropayments is that everyone out there gets paid for every view they get to their site.
but i really can't see myself paying eg 1ct per webpage view. even if it only adds up to $1 per day thats $30 per month, just for browsing the web.
my fear is that most people will vastly overestimate the value of their content, if they are allowed to decide how much visitors should be paying. we would have to lock the price to 0.1ct in order to make webbrowsing affordable, but at that price you need 1000 viewers per day if you want to get any return for your efforts. you'll need 10-20 times more if you want this to pay your salary.
for most people it's not even worth the trouble.
payments only make sense for specialty content where i am willing to actually pay a premium to get it. which is what we have now. without a general micropayment system.
(btw: your book project does sound very interesting and i hope you may find a way to complete it, but i can see the challenge to talk about the less positive sides of people without being hurtful)
but these are subscriptions, not pay-a-few-cents-per-view where the payment is so small that you should not care. it's like paying per sms. i think except maybe for high earners, people do care and prefer services that don't charge in an uncontrollable way.
pay-per-view for movies works because it contrasts with buying the movie on a dvd or going to the cinema. but the same is not true for reading webpages like news articles (which is the most obvious use for micropayments)
the idea behind micropayments is that everyone out there gets paid for every view they get to their site.
but i really can't see myself paying eg 1ct per webpage view. even if it only adds up to $1 per day thats $30 per month, just for browsing the web.
my fear is that most people will vastly overestimate the value of their content, if they are allowed to decide how much visitors should be paying. we would have to lock the price to 0.1ct in order to make webbrowsing affordable, but at that price you need 1000 viewers per day if you want to get any return for your efforts. you'll need 10-20 times more if you want this to pay your salary.
for most people it's not even worth the trouble.
payments only make sense for specialty content where i am willing to actually pay a premium to get it. which is what we have now. without a general micropayment system.
(btw: your book project does sound very interesting and i hope you may find a way to complete it, but i can see the challenge to talk about the less positive sides of people without being hurtful)