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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.
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
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
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
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
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.
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.
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
Perhaps a valid argument 15 years ago. So why hasn't the same old CD format not dropped in price after all this time, all that volume, yet it's now the same old quality as it's been since the beginning?
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)?
Ah, here we have the real motive. The industry thinks, "Hmmm...we could pass our savings on to the consumers or--- BWAHAHAHA what am I THINKING? They'll pay for it, we charge 'em for it, case closed."
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Private Essayist
is this.....is this for REAL?
great comedy company.
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.