Slashdot Mirror
Scott McCloud on Comics and the Internet, part 2
strredwolf writes: "Scott McCloud, author of Understanding Comics and Reinventing Comics, posted up his latest I Can't Stop Thinking comic essay. In it, he continues on his "Coins of the Realm" series on Micropayments, citing the RIAA in price gouging (records costing $15, but tapes $2 a pop), and using Napster as an example on how to "put it to the man" by charging only 15 cents/song, and sending all the money over to the artists themselves. He also points to Scott Kurtz PvP, and how if every viewer chipped in 25 cents, and accounting for hosting and handling costs, Kurtz would be on a $73,000/year payrole! Interesting arguments. Saw on the PvP site." We linked to the prior essay as well, if you missed it.
I use slashdot every day, and I'm still not registered with a login. I refuse to use sites that require me to remember logins and passwords, it's just not worth the trouble to remember them all. Cookies don't really work. I multiple computers. When I do finally get around to making a cookied login somewhere, it only lasts as long as my current computer (few months lifespan). If I really want something, I'll make yet another login. I make a new one every time I check ebay, or on the few occasions when I want to post somewhere or read one of the NYT story links. Unless one of these Micro-payment systems turns out to have magically no accounting costs for me, it won't be worth the trouble. There can never be such a system, because at the very least they cause me the trouble of estimating how much viewing a page is worth to me, and to use valuable thinking cycles determining if I want to pay for them. And god forbid I accidentally payed for a John Katz article on accident...
Bollocks. Supposing you read 5 articles a day, every day of the year.... that's $18.25 for the year if you pay a cent per article. Not much to pay if you enjoy what you're reading, and if you don't enjoy it enough to pay $18 or so for the year, then you stop reading. And if 10,000 people are paying that much, then /. have $182500 that they didn't have before... and that money can be used to improve the site, or whatever.
And who cares if usage drops like a rock. Usage will drop on crap sites, but the websites that you frequent will have a much-needed cash boost. I read PVP (mentioned in the essay) every day and would have no problem paying Scott Kurtz a few cents per comic strip if it helps him keep his site running.
Not a scam, and it is admirable. Plus, frankly, if you're too stupid to let your money 'flow through your fingers' without an awareness of where it's going, then you deserve to lose it.
Actually, PayPal has a Webcart feature, but you may have to do a bit of Perl CGI magic to make sure those who've paid get the PDFs. There's ways around it, but still..
That, and you have to upgrade the account too, which would add some more fees for the privlage of the weblinks and the Debit Mastercard (which I just got today).
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WolfSkunks for a better Linux Kernel
$Stalag99{"URL"}="http://stalag99.keenspace.com";
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# Canmephians for a better Linux Kernel
$Stalag99{"URL"}="http://stalag99.net";
Suppose someone actually set up a scheme where you pay 25 cents/month to see a site, free the first few times so you can decide whether it interests you, and paying by the month rather than by the page.
In order for this to work, it would have to be voluntary: someone *could* just keep pretending they were new, there on the free trial, or they could share passwords or send the comics to their friends, or whatever.
On the other hand, 25 cents isn't a lot of money. If it were convenient, people wouldn't avoid it, assuming they actually liked what they were getting. The time it takes to read a comic strip each day for a month is probably worth more than 25 cents to the viewer. The right interface would probably just be a thing that popped up if you hadn't paid for a month and you'd read more than a couple strips; you click the thing and don't think about it again for another month.
The main issue I see is that micropayments only make sense if you're making a bunch of them. Getting money into the system only works on a larger scale (~20$); similarly, getting money out of the system requires a large number of payments.
If you're going to pay $20/month to the sites you pay, and all of them will accept payments from the same account, it's feasible with credit cards or checks to the micropayment bank. But if there are only a few sites, it's going to be hard to find sites you'd be willing to spend enough on each month to justify getting the account.
Repeat after me. "Inflation. Inflation. Inflation." If a product sells for $15 in 1980 and that same product sells for $15 in 2000, it HAS gone down in price. Any product that doesn't increase in price over time has it's real cost decrease due to the inflation of other prices around it.
If a product's price goes down in non-inflation adjusted dollars, then the decrease is substantial when figured in inflation adjusted dollars. There's a reason that economists quote figures in inflation adjusted dollars. It's because it's the most meaningful way to compare prices over time.
This is the same principle used to say that most people are making less money than they did in the 70s. Sure the dollar amounts are more, but indexed for inflation, the real dollars are less.
The Glass is Too Big: My Take on Things
See how successful you are sending radio stations a URL instead of a big presspack and a CD..
It's not the best system, it's just the ONLY system.. It's doomed in the long term (what isn't?), but it's *so* much more complex then pressing cost vs. retail cost..
This is the way to take micropayments. 1% fee, max 50 cents on any transaction, and it's not prone to the same frauds, charges and chargebacks which credit cards are. Plus it stores value as real physical gold, which they'll mail to you if you ask (in 400 oz bar increments only). Not some funny money prone to vanish when the company does.
.sig
For the addy, see my
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Payment methods designed for the Internet Is a good site..
Funny you should say that. Keenspot Premium. $4.95 a month, no ads. It's new, so I'm not sure how well it is working.
This has a negative side effect of centralization. If one of the comics is unavailable, it is almost certain that all of the comics are unavailable. With Keenspot, it seems they suffer a major failure roughly once a month.
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But then again, I could be wrong.
While I like the Idea of micropayments, who wants to spend 10 minutes inputting their personal information just to listen to a song?? (And pay for it.)
.50 per pop...) Remember, this assumes a 10% processing fee. I don't think anyone can justify the transaction and support headaches when you do a half a million transactions for $8,000 Gross profit. (What's the net?)
Companies like CCbill, iBill, and Pay Pal give me the crawling hebie-jeebies. Here I am, redirected from the website I was at, and I'm being asked to give them not only my credit card number, but then tell them my demographic, etc...
And Amazon?? No thank you. I don't want the spam, and I know that the person I'm trying to give the money to is only going to get half. (There goes that guy's 73,000 bucks.) Also, amazon is not going to like that guy doing 360,000 credit card transactions a year. (At
Micropayments will not be a relity until you give the consumers the ability to pass money back and forth over the net on a one-to-one basis. Sad but true...
but I thought people decided that micropayments wouldn't work, mostly because people hate paying for everything. The mere act of needing to decide to buy becomes overwhelming when you need to buy everything. Thus a paper newspaper sells the whole paper, not individual sections or individual articles. There are links I'm sure people could supply.
In any case, I think if a _network_ charged people fees it might work. An artist could have a very small webspace to introduce people, or show just today's comic, but then you'd subscribe to, say, keenspot for 3 bucks a month and you'd have access to the whole network. I would do that.
the paypal donation method also works ok, but given NPR's need for underwriting it's not sustainable on its own.
Have you looked at PayPal? Another poster mentioned it, but if you look at the business account, you'll see that anything up to $15 has only a .30 cent fee!! Not to mention that they have a very good instaled user base of people who will have money sitting in a PayPal account and thus a bit more likley to buy something cheap.
I've used them both to accept payments and to pay others for quite a while now, and I've never seen anything come close to being the bargain PayPal is.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I am not sure. It's a good question. But the better question is this: do artists perceive that they would earn more under this system. That's the real ticket. I am sure that Lars and the boys are incapable of making the analysis themselves, so will defer to the wise analysis of their trusted (read: RIAA sponsored) accountants.
Yeah, that last bit is ranting, but what I think doesn't matter: what the bands think is what matters.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
Sounds like preaching to the choir to me. I pay what I think something is worth (for music, probably 30-75 cents per track, maybe as much as a dollar for something really good.) and after sucking out a little bit to pay for the server, it goes to the artist.
I think we already know that this won't work anytime soon. First is the issue of credit/debit cards. If MC or Visa takes 3% (with a minimum of $1), the system is fucked. This should be solvable by either: MC or VISA lowering their cut, or having a 'net card (sounds like deja vu. I'm sure I've heard this before) wherein you buy a $20 gift certificate from micropay.com. Your band signs up as a MicroPay band. Then, every time they get $4-$5, they get a check. All of this is highly automatable. You could probably even kludge GnuCash or something to do it really cheap.
The next problem is greed. The first and easy target of greed are the 'middlemen'. They (let's call them.... Sony) own the lawyers. The lawyers own the courts, and the courts make the rules. The middlemen don't want to go back to selling 2x4's and real estate. They like going to fancy parties and awards shows. What motivation do they possibly have to give the artist back some rights?
Second is the artists. Let's face it, Lars and the gang are a bunch of greedy pricks. Same thing with Courtney Love. That much heroin isn't free. How are they gonna keep their noses packed on $70,000 per year? For every band that talks about 'doing it for the music', there are 50 who have dreams of being the big rock star, with a Lambo, a Ferrari, and a bunch of hooker^H^H^H^H^H^Hsupermodel girlfriends. That ratio gets worse when the good natured band gets a taste of success.
Only consumers want this system. The record companies certainly don't. The radio stations are terrified of it (although this would work for them. No more annual payments for broadcast rights. Play a Britney song, pay for a Britney song.) And worst of all, I honestly don't think most of the 'musicians' would really care for it.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
Highlander.
-Restil
Play with my webcams and lights here
Er...this will probably get me modded down (Score:-1, greedy) and e-gold isn't just a currency for micropayments, since big payments work better too....but there's a company with what's been called an "offbeat scheme" by the clue-impaired and "just a currency" by me, which has been in the black for more than a year, and has been around since 1996. From the looks of things, we're doing ok, despite very little hype. We store plenty of metal for our customers (of all sorts, in many nations) these days.
Of course, the filthy yellow metal occupies the most emotional spot on the periodic table (see some past replies to my rants) and so far major artists haven't yet set up tipjars, but I'm not giving up. Fairtunes has the right idea, if artists insist on someone else doing it for them, but I think that by using the internet artists should connect more-directly to fans. Some of them already do (I'm thinking of Ted Nugent and Todd Rundgren, among others). Scott Adams gets plenty of great ideas for Dilbert by reading his email, and the same is probably possible for songs.
I think the key is to make payments preferably-voluntary and small, and I think there's certainly space for more than one payment system and more than one currency-flavor. Of course, what do I know? I also think Slashdot-like sites should try to sell mod-points.
JMR
Speaking ONLY for me!
Try e-gold - (contact me). I'm NOT e-
As many have commented, the problem with micropayments is the not so micro transaction costs. Paying somebody 5 cent makes no sense if it costs $1 to make the transaction.
Here is a way around it.
Instead of every customer paying 5 cent for your comic (or whatever), every customer could have a 1% chance/risk of paying $5. The seller gets as much money, the customers pay as much on average, and even if you're unlucky once, $5 isn't gonna break anyone's budget. And the transaction costs are cut by 99%.
It's a bit odd, but I say it could absolutely work in practice.
I think that was my point, actually. If someone did pay .25 to read PvP the first time, I don't think they'd do it again. Especially since there are better comics out there for free.
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Win dain a lotica, en vai tu ri silota
I have not paid him yet. Why?
Several reasons. One is simple sloth. Another is that I have never done micro-payments and am not sure which system to choose. Those are the lame reasons.
The real reason, the one that has been holding me up for a couple of months is that he chose a micropayment system that REQUIRES me to give Amazon.com my credit card number. They keep it on file and active. I am just not comfortable with the risk. From time to time, I have bought things online: a DIMM here, software there. These purchases have been few and far between. I know that online commerce is about as safe as in person transactions (safer in some cases). I just cannot shake the idea that they are going to keep my credit card on file.
It isn't just the risk of crackers or abusive employee's (probably miniscule). It is the idea that this "wallet" that I would set up with Amazon is not really money, but credit. I don't want credit. I want online money. Credit cards have burned me several times in my life: everything from my step-kids "borrowing" my card number (from an old bill) to buy something online, to merchant fraud, to credit card mis-charges. I have credit cards, but I don't LIKE credit cards.
Scott's chosen payment system requires me to have a credit card. I just don't want to support it.
So Scott, it is up to you. If you will accept PayPal, I will sign up today. If you will accept a check, just give me a P.O. box and it will be in the mail.
I want to support you. I want to support all the art I like, be it music, games, movies, or books. The potential explosion of art and artistry worldwide would be staggering if micropayments can be made to work. Unfortunately, to work it must FEEL as easy and as safe as tipping a waiter or dropping coins in a street performer's hat. Credit card based systems will not do that.
So Scott, help me out. I want to give you money. How do I do it?
I.V.
"These laws they're passing won't even compile anymore, let alone execute." - anon
A lot of people are posting comments to the effect of "micropayments are broken because it takes more too much work/requires you to give out too much information to work." His first strip agrees with you. He's asking someone to set up a system where you enter information once in a secure form and reuse that information anywhere you want to send a payment. Then you click a button on the website to pay him, no matter where that website is, and ten cents comes out. (I would add the condition that you can cancel the bill within a certain amount of time to protect against being tricked into paying money.)
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It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
So many of these "costs" are just the old ways insisting on surviving.
Recording costs are real. But who is setting these prices?
"Getting between" is the operative phrase. So much of the CD's costs is just a line of people with their hands out.
But suppose it worked like this:
A premium section on MP3.com that worked along those lines might be a modest win. The basic problem with MP3.com is that there's lots of stuff, but most of it is very, very bad, for exactly the reason Scott McCloud points out - there's no way to make a living doing it.
This might work for music, where there's general agreement on the unit of measure (the "song"). Comics and games would be tougher. It's definitely worth a try for music.
The justification offered by the recording industry is that CD's are both higher fidelity and longer lasting than tapes. Since you are getting a better quality product that does not deteriorate with use they feel justified in charging higher prices. Also, people keep buying CD's at the current prices in greater numbers every year so what incentive has the industry had to lower prices (FTC anti-trust rulings aside)?
Don't you think artists would make more money under such a system, not less? Right now, don't most musicians get about $1/album? What if they sold the album direct for $3 and ended up pocketing $2?
It's not the record companies that'd be doing the charging, though. It'd be the artists themselves. So, no, it's not in Universal Records' best interests for, say, Tool to put their next album up on the web as high-quality MP3s for two bucks a download... but who cares? In that scenario, Universal has no rights; they're simply not involved.
I think you are missing the point. The author would be expecting to earn an income on a continual basis, and thus would have to produce good enough material for you to want to go back. If he produces crap, you won't go to his site any more, you wont pay him his $0.25 a month (or whatever), and before long he will be making no money. Sounds like a pretty good way to quickly eliminate garbage if you ask me. At least this way you are not having over-hyped sub-standard material pushed down your throat by some corporation, you are only paying for what you want to hear/read, and you know your money is going straight to the author and not lining some executive's pockets. This sounds pretty good to me.
So besides starving artists and fans of the starving artists, who really wants this? Obviously Visa etc. don't give a rat's arse about micropayments or we'd have them already. And sadly it will take the backing of major players like Visa to get a system off the ground. (If someone can do an end run around them, so much the better.)
Just this week I was wrestling with this problem. I have a publishing company, and we sell books... but I wanted to try selling a $3 PDF as an experiment. And I wanted to do it withough larding up MY web server with ecommerce software and file hosting. I wanted a place to upload files, and said place would handle the payment/download, and then just send me a check.
I looked all over. There's Digibuy, but they charge a MINIMUM commission of $2... sort of pointless for a $3 download. And they were one of the cheapest.
Eventually I found swreg.org. They have a micropayment pay-for-download service. For products with a price of up to $7, they charge you $0.69 in commission. Best deal I have found. Terrible interface, but the value seems to be there, in case anyone was looking for something like this too. It's not a true micropayment in the "pay 1 cent to view my comic strip" sense, but it fit my needs anyway.
function MicroSteal(amount)
{
ieCOM_cybercashValidate(EJ348-JKHKL-34HPQ-UU961-9
}
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Hammer of Truth
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Hammer of Truth
Hey.
And sadly it will take the backing of major players like Visa to get a system off the ground. (If someone can do an end run around them, so much the better.)
The problem is probably that you have to pay about a $2 charge for credit card transfers, etc.
One could develop a centeral site (Secure, open source, etc) where you pay, say $10 by credit card, and that apears in your 'online account'. You can then pay that to another person, bit by bit. i.e. you can pay out $0.05 or so to one site. The site then balances things up, and sends out money when you collect above a certain amount.
Or something.
Michael
"Goodness me, how unlike the FBI to abuse the trust of the American public." -- The Onion
Yes indeed, they put DVD decoders in software and look where that got them... somoene reverse engineered it from the software and pirates sprang out of the wood work everywhere to copy content to Divx because it allows easy distribution.
Now thats all fine and well for movies, I like to pirate a movie every now and then too... but Id rather not all the information needed to plunder my money be exposed and copied as easily.
Of course CSS was an inherently unsafe system where obscurity of the underlying algorithm and not the key's was the most important safe guard, although the initial keys used were from reverse engineered software again showing the danger of software... not like e-money schemes which mostly rely on open encryption standards assumed to be strong, but lets not let facts prevent either of us from making stupid analogies.
Reverse engineering of hardware can be made much more difficult and expensive than for software, especially using circuits which only store key's dynamically (ie. always on devices). Even if reverse engineered it doesnt help much, in a good e-money system using public key encryption there are no secret keys on the cards which compromise the system... they just compromise the money stored on it, not worth the effort. With software its much easier and once done can be abused remotely... with exploits coming out like clockwork that is a dangerous mix.
is this.....is this for REAL?
great comedy company.
Seriously, that's how paypal works. Put money in your account from your credit cards or just with a direct bank draft, then pay it to other paypal members as you please. It's become like the de-facto way to pay for things on e-bay.
When money or profits is at steak (mmm...Steak) business logic and common sense are not two in the same. Of course it would make sense to recoupe losses by charging a penny on the dollar for music, but any company with investors would never accept such a legimate loss. By proclaiming all music that is not paid in full via retail outlet can be declared illegal and be omitted from the general ledger. It is still a business, and no business would ever destroy their precious gross product earnings by supporting such a weak revenue model.
"Get them before they get....
Over the last few years there have been literally dozens of attempts to get a micropayment system up. I've been researching them all and, unbelievably, they're all quite lacking. Some require a phone card (I have to go to the gas station to access a website), some have $1 minimums, many require too much investment of time and money on the part of the content-provider. As far as I can tell there's not a single micropayments company that's doing significant business. Even qpass, though it has top-flight customers, gets very little traffic.