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Scott McCloud Tries Webcomic Micropayment
jaime g. wong writes "Scott McCloud's latest comic, 'The Right Number', is finally available online... for just 25 cents! McCloud has discussed the concept of micropayment for online comics before; let's all hope this idea, using BitPass technology, will succeed." There's more info via a a Comic Book Resources article, and Tycho over at Penny Arcade also has opinions on the micropayment route: "..if you have enough readers who care about your work to go through all that rigmarole, you could succeed with any business model... I see it as a model for compensation, lined up with the other models for compensation, like at the police station."
people who don't/can't have a credit card/PayPal account/whatever ?
For just 25 cents, you too can read this post!
Is that a millionth of a normal payment?
Games Workshop Petition
leave me out. I've inserted quarter after quarter, but now all my drive does is grind.
Stephen King already tried that and it doesn't work. Micropayments are too complicated. It reminds me of shareware... "please register" and stuff.
~~~Please pass the salt, I hate unsalted MD5s
But, "me too". What about people who can't (teenagers, for example) pay online? Is there something that will allow them to still read their much sought-after content (mailing in a money order to pre-pay, or something along those lines)?
Won't he get sued by Amazon?
More ads + higher prices.
http://www.pico-pay.com/
Users don't actually pay anything, but need to watch some advertiser web-sites. Might be worthwhile for Comic publishers and independent music publishers too.
I hope that micropayments catch on. Right now, you need to jump through hoops to get it going, but if the cost to the webmaster is low enough, and it becomes common enough that people use it frequently, this could be a viable business model.
It will be absolutely wonderful for people who want to see a small amount of quality content, without having to buy the whole sack of kittens. Also, I think folks will find it invaluable as a "try before you buy" sort of thing. I don't like subscriptions, I don't want to buy your t-shirts, but micropayments have really caught my attention.
Auto-reply to ACs: "Truly, you have a dizzying intellect."
99% of web comics suck. The 1% that don't don't need to worry about payment.
There's an old PA comic where they mock Scott's love of micropayments here.
In today's PA Tycho clarifies this somewhat by making an interesting point about micropayments: they can only keep you afloat if you get lots of them. And if you're a comic producer getting that much attention, you can probably survive by selling ad space, merchandising, subscriptions etc. So the numbers needed to make micropayments viable are probably similar to the numbers needed to make web comics viable (in a business sense) full stop.
Vino, gyno, and techno -Bruce Sterling
There's no dearth of good online comics for every taste... silly ones, serious ones, adult, anime (all sorts there), etc.
Not to mention that I imagine many online comic readers are teens without a credit card, or people who have no inclination to go out and purchase comics.
If he really wants to make money, he should get his comic published in print. Nice idea, for-pay online comics, but it won't work. Sorry.
With a credit card the provider (visa/mc/amex/etc) charges X% or $.x for a transaction. This can become exorbitant for some retailers and some impose the "minimum amount for credit card purchases". How would micropayments get around this flaw? I could see possibly creating a new type of credit where I could put $20 (from credit card) into this account and the provider (on the web this time and not a behemoth) doesn't charge outrageous percentages/fees for such small payments?
Is that how this works or is this something else entirely?
Note how it says once you pay you can save it to your drive. Bad copy protection, game over. I'm a comics fan and even I am reluctant to pay 25 cents for this, because I know I'll be getting this for free sent to me via email somehow.
There have been many attempts at micropayment systems. Some with accounts. Some prepaid. Some with anonymous digital cash. They all have failed so far.
Paypal can do small payments (on non credit card transactions) but they don't push it and I doubt they make money on it. But at least they are a success.
I think there is something wrong with micropayments, they are not just waiting for somebody to come along and do it right. Projects like digicash, cybercash, first virtual, millicent, all had major funders backing them and good people.
There is a human cost to small payments, and you can't get rid of it. Computers can cheaply bill those fractional pennies but humans don't like thinking about them.
I tried to find out how much I (as an overseas customer) actually
have to pay to get $3 worth of BitPass credits, but even after the
15th click through their pages and "FAQ" I couldn't find out. Do
they accomodate for all charges, or do I end up with 15 EUR deducted
from my VISA card, including charges, currency conversion fees, for
3 dollars of cyber currency?
Used to say donations and banner ad's weren't effective. That is until he put up a paypal donation button...
Several thousand dollars later, stunned by the fiscal support of his readers, he got a job in the industry and quit writing...
Doesn't penny arcade use a similar system(or used to). I remember the page having a themometer and measuring donations in thousands.
So if good content can get by on donations, are micropayments even interesting anymore?
Anybody got some bittorrent links?
Sure would be nice if you could buy an ecash card in the checkout lane at wal-mart. If the phone company can do it I just don't understand why a banking company can't.
Fucking hell - even Hustler does it. Time for Visa to step out of the 70's.
Will MicroPay if you mod me up
"There is no teacher but the enemy."-Mazer Rackham
If they put no copy protection on it, you'll just steal it.
If they put copy protection on it, you'll bitch about fair use, wait till someone brighter than you hacks it, and then steal it.
Does that sum things up?
Would be somewhat modeled on Apple's iTunes Music Store, with a bit of O'Reilly bookshelf thrown in. People could download an app, for free. It has exclusive access to a large number of online web comics. A person can enter their credit card info in the app (stored in the online store for one click purchasing, like amazon and apple use). They can view a small number of example strips from each comic to get a taste for them, but to view them regularly must subscribe to a script. Subscribing doesn't cost anything, but whenever the person looks at a non-previously viewed strip ina subscription, it adds a small amount, maybe 10 cents, to their bill. To explain my reasoning some: the reason for a standalone app is to make the experience very fast for the user, and continuous, unlike using a web browser. It should feel like a normal app (though a lot of the viewing could be done in a specialized markup language, like the iTMS). It also makes it much easier to do transparent micropayments. The example strips thing is obvious. It would also give the author a way of controlling the first look at their strip, a common problem with online comics (bad first impressions). The subscription thing is to prevent buyers from getting "I really didn't want to look at it" syndrome as easily. If they have to choose a strip as one they regularly want to view, it's a lot different from idly clicking a strip and having to pay 10 cents. It also makes in app organization easier to handle and use (since having an option to view a strip, and having a handy shortcut to it in your sidebar would be synonymous). You know, now that I think about it . . . *starts looking into how much it costs for a one click license*
For to end yet again.
There's an old PA comic where they mock Scott's love of micropayments here [penny-arcade.com].
(from PA's webserver) Warning: Host '192.168.50.65' is blocked because of many connection errors. Unblock with 'mysqladmin flush-hosts' in /data/users/penny-arcade/www/php_admin_header.php3 on line 11
Perhaps Scott can mock them back for having their backend database server automatically block their frontend webserver, which is pretty piss-poor of whoever their admin is...not to mention, crappy error handling(programmer's fault) and insecure PHP configuration options(sysadmin again- detailed PHP errors shouldn't go to the user, only the logs, and yes, PHP has an option for this. For example, I now know that php_admin_header.php3 is probably an include- and includes sometimes do fun/exciting/revealing things when executed standalone.)
Please help metamoderate.
I read abou this, then I thought: how does this differ from PayPal? You still have to sign up for the bit pass thing initially. If you're going to be putting the effort into registering for something, why not just sign up for Paypal and pay the guy a quarter that way? There's no transaction fee, AFAIK.
Until I can put a quarter in a machine and have it dissappear and reappear in the artist's machine, I don't think micropayments'll catch on too much. But I hope I'm wrong.
c-hack.com |
Could be worse. I could be pintpayments.
"Let's see, 12 inches in a foot, pint's a pound the world around, 2 weeks in a fortnight...so to view 36 comics over 6 weeks I'd need to pay him...ah crap, does anyone remember how many pints in in a gallon?"
Please help metamoderate.
a free link?
Youuuuuu bastards,,, you slashdotted PA!!!
Honestly, I'd much rather pay a micro fee than having to view annoying flashy ads. I hate them, and I honestly don't see how they really benefit the site owners; Does ad revenue like that really work? It's not like TV ads, and internet ads just don't have the same effect as TV ads, in my opinion. Except that they are much more annoying than TV ads, in general.
Although there certainly is something to say for internet ads; they are pretty much no-hassle, and are much easier than a micropay system. Maybe if it was really streamlined, like amazon's one-click system, it would be convenient...But then they'd get sued ;)
I gave it a try. BitPass was painless to setup. I clicked on the $3 button, entered my email address as a username, a password, credit card info, and was reading the comic within 60 seconds.
How was the story? Excellent! It is an enjoyable story with moments of tension and humor tied together by an underlying theme of mathematics. Great adult geek fare. I highly recommend it, although I'm still trying to decide if it was long enough for 25 cents. (Afterall I pay nothing for my operating system!)
Michael.
Linux : Mac
Penny Arcade seems to be on and off slashdotted (w/ beautiful PHP error messages), so here's what Tycho had to say about micropayments:
Both Scotts are talking about Micropayments, so I figured, why not.
When reading about Scott McCloud's The Right Number, the new digital work he is offering for a 25 cent micropay, I was trying to resolve a Chicken and Egg problem. Micropayments are only going to work if you, by which I mean you the consumer, like them. But you'll only like them if there's something super compelling for you to go through the trouble of signing up. But if there aren't a lot of consumers out there ready to flip them nickels or quarters, there's not a whole lot of impetus to go through the trouble of setting up with the system as an artist. And even once you do, then what do you get - two bucks? I believed that Micropayments were an invigorating concept because when I was first introduced to them, it resonated with my subconscious belief that the Internet was Man's Eden. You can fuck with me about the exact phrasing of that, but more geeks than would care to admit it totemize the Internet in one way or another - they believe it is inherently a force for good and has a fundamentally idyllic nature. In any case, I was like, "Yes - this makes sense because it will further equality and the producers of artistic works will be compensated by this benevolent system." I am telling you, once you subtract the faith element from the equation, there isn't a whole lot left.
Here is where I stand now. I don't doubt that Micropayments could do magical things for people, but there are many barriers to this actually happening - barriers of a social, technical, and monetary nature. That isn't anything more than I've said before. The new part follows: if you could make Micropayments work, rubbing nickels and dimes together until the friction creates a tiny bit of warmth you can treasure, then you could make any system work. You have enough people giving you a dime to live on? Giving you a buck, even? Then why are you messing around with Micros? If you have enough readers who care about your work to go through all that rigamaroll, you could succeed with any business model. You and the Captain could make it Happen.
I see it as a model for compensation, lined up with the other models for compensation, like at the police station. All of them cast in an unflattering light, none of them posessed of magical powers.
(CW)TB out.
[SIG] It's like putting a moose in the blender -- a recipe for disaster!
any of the gold based systems. for example e-gold.com (800,000+ account holders, averaging ~1-2 million USD plus in transactions per day, fee for a 25 cent transaction is .25 cents worth of gold).
.25 worth of gold.
see a comparison of 8 of these type of systems here.
how hard is it to accept 25 cents worth of gold?
click 100998-USD.25.e-gold.com to pay
The right size to fit in a USB port, of course!
I agree that micropayments might not be the best solution for selling creative content online but youth not being able to buy into this system is really not an issue with this paticular content as it is "for mature readers only."
webcomics.com has hundreds of comics online for free.
-- these are only opinions and they might not be mine.
What sort of mechanism /design could they be using to make an uncopyable single-use token to give to the content sites?
A Single-Use keypair? A cookie could be easily intercepted and copied/published. Passwords, etc. as well.
It'd be an interesting gambit if this took off. For better or for worse ( Imagine your online bank charging you $.25 every time you ask them a question... )
Kremvax...
--- Little Atomo - The Amazing Thinking Robot from Atomocom! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GIP9KisHi4k
.. microenough payment? Or has it all gone to click thru 'cause too many of us block popus, filter spam, and block adservers with cool things in userContent.css like
A:link[HREF*="ads."] IMG { display: none ! important }
??
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos
And say "Whoa, the Highlander has something on /., SWEET"?
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
That really depends on the humans, and how much the payments are. Slashdot charges subscribers half a penny per pageload. Let me tell ya: it doesn't bother me. I can burn gasoline in a car or electricity in a well airconditioned office while using an Athlon, faster than I can burn money loading Slashdot pages. I don't stare at my computers and get ulcers while nervously thinking, "Oh damn, there goes another penny to the power company. There goes another." Make it small enough and it just doesn't matter.
The name is derived from "peppercorn," the smallest unit of value that can be exchanged to form a contract under traditional contract law. Peppercoin was founded in late 2001 by Professors Silvio Micali and Ronald L. Rivest, co-founders of the Cryptography and Information Security Group at MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science. Rivest is known as the "R" in the RSA public-key cryptosystem and a founder of RSA Security, while Micali is the co-inventor of Zero Knowledge Proofs.
Besides, this is the only way I can get my Catapult fix.
Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm
Blah blah blah...
"It'll never work!"
iTunes
Blah blah blah...
"Nobody will pay for electronic content..."
except iTunes
Blah blah blah...
"Everything sux"
except my favorite band, which has their entire repertoire on iTunes
(Somewhere along the line, the word BULLSHIT begins to appear around the edges of the argument until you realize that the people who bitch the most are the ones who just want it all, and they want it all for free)
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
If there was a slot on my computer where I could stick a quarter, I'd have done it. I have a quarter right here on my desk. But I really can't see filling in some form, working out a bank transaction, no doubt getting a bunch more spam, etc, etc, just for some comic.
It's definitely worth 25c in a cash transaction. But micropayments still fundamentally don't work on the Web.
-Graham
There have been many attempts at micropayment systems. Some with accounts. Some prepaid. Some with anonymous digital cash. They all have failed so far.
It's so fucking easy to be a skeptic, isn't it? So fucking easy...
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
It would require people to pay for web comics.
Majority of web comic viewers go to them because
a)they have nothing else to do.
b)there free.
I have proably most english web comics out there, I still visit userfriendly.org, pvponline.com, and reallifecomics.com but I wouldn't pay for them.
I might by merchandise, occasionally purchaes a hard bound version(if it contains new material), and regularly click on the banner.
I would seem that anybody who would pay, should just click on a banner.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Bad idea. You'll need a virtual credit card number from Citi Cards, that's only good one time, and they also generate a expiration date,
(this month) and the number on the back of the card for you. You can do all this for a 25 cent purchase, but that's a lot of trouble. My Banker, (Trustmark) said "Do not let your credit card number out on the Internet."
Part of the problem of prior micropayment efforts was that they were topheavy, and cash-burning. I mean, if you're giving away $5 every time someone signs up for an account, that's $5 you have to earn in fees before you break even on that particular customer. Add that to the burn level required for website bandwidth, the venture capitalists, the lawyers (who are required by the VCs), etc. and that's a lot of cash that is being eaten up.
Interestingly enough, BitPass is taking PayPal, which should help to reduce certain costs that had to be borne entirely by prior efforts. Also, in this post dot-crash environment, they should be more focused on earning profits, rather than trying to get "eyeballs" and "mindshare", which should keep them from making some of the more stupid mistakes of their predecessors.
Biggest problem I see? Trying to get widespread adoption, and trying to support their business solely on micropayments (that was FV's mistake in my opinion.) Now, maybe they're going to branch out, but they're going to need a very LARGE volume of $.25 payments to generate any meaningful amount of revenues for the VCs.
But having dozens of companies try to do it on their own has failed. None is universal enough to be worth the bother.
The govt should step in and institute a micropayment system for all transactions over 5 cents, and handle transactions, for free. (Okay, included in your annual tax bill to be precise). This would avoid the lack of trust, conflicting standards, and huge advertising costs that have caused other attempts to fail. And a centralized system prevents multiple spending, paving the way for anonymous e-cash. Once a standard interface to micropayments exists, it will quickly be integrated with browsers to increase convenience.
Yes, it would cost money to get it going, and to run it. But so does printing cash and stamps, and running the Secret Service and SEC. We need new ideas and new markets to revamp our ailing economy, and this seems almost like a no-brainer. Establishing common currency is a good way for govt to facilitate trade.
Debit cards are still not anonymous. When your little brother pays for something that purchase still can be traced to his home. When you pay cash for something, however, this isn't always so. That's why I said ecash and not debit; I was speaking of a card that was nothing but a number of an "account" with X dollars in it; you buy the card (maybe for X+$3 so the card issuer gets its service fee), and when the money in that "account" is spent you throw the card away - just like those phone cards you'll find littering any large city.
Hmmm. Could someone cook up an interface so that if someone wanted to send you an e-mail, they'd have to micropay your account? Major ISPs could credit your account with a limited amount of money so you could send e-mail to other ISPs. They'd do this in order to try and cut support costs related to supressing spam.
I mean, jesus christ man...go outside or something.
dont click there it's going to wherley's account directly from your e-gold account if you ever set up one.
I hope they don't. They give most of the power to whoever runs the micropayment system. There are already too many middle men on media, and I don't want another lobbying force in there.
.$.25 on my card - I don't want to risk credit problems, overcharging, fraud, or any of the other problems that dealing with e-money inherently create, and making a ton of small purchases exacerbate.
Further, you can't be sure that you'll get what you pay for when you buy information without having seen it (click here to get this comic - except that this one is with a guest artist who doesn't know how to draw and is too stupid to make good jokes).
You want a good alternative? Try the subscription model. It works beautifully, and even if you can't get what you pay for the first time, over a course of ALL the articles you can look at, you can know. Plus, it's easier to provide samples of some of the content you'll see, so that the artists won't inadvertently defraud anyone (which is very likely to happen if they do micropayments - through the use of articles that turn out to be duds).
Finally, you have to consider the value to the customer. I don't want to put a $.25 charge on my credit card. I don't want 50
I'd much prefer a huge one-time payment so that I didn't have to worry as much about it.
I would say that we should boycott any place that believes that micropayments are a good idea, but I don't think I have to.
That business model is as unsound as a vaccuum.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
-Xander
Anyone who would stiff someone over 0.25 would have to be the biggest lameass in the world, especially at what could be considered a critical time when a new business model is being implemented (and someone's livelyhood is at stake).
Seriously, if you have any desire to check out the comic, cough it up.
SEO Copywriter. Just Say ON
wow, contrary to what people are saying, at least bitwise is supereasy to get set up with, when I clicked the read comic, I counted maybe 40 seconds between when I started and when I finished, and now it'll take even less time.
On top of that, it was a good comic. Can't wait for second chapter. 3 cheers for micropayments!
What is needed here is a system similar to phone cards. I can go to any quickie mart these days, drop a 5, 10, or 20 spot into a machine and get a phone card (for 1.9 cents a minute!) It's a safe, secure, anonymous model. Someone hacks a site or lifts my card, I'm out ~$20 at worst. The anonymous, no, it's not that I'm doing something illegal or surfing porn, it's that I do not need more targeted marketing littering my mailbox. I long for a way to purchace things on the Net, with out a long term commitment, another (non)privacy policy that states that they are 'affiliates' with the world, and above all (and this is even in the real world brick and mortor world) you do not need my zip code and you do not need my phone number. Micropayments can work, but only if it is a same as cash kind of thing.
Personally I don't think micropayments will work because it goes against the basic way we all use the web. You fire up a web browser, you navigate to where you want to go, stuff shows up in the browser window. The stuff in that window you pretty much never worry about paying for.
:) But my views on this are a little extreme, and really, I only apply them to my own works (in fact, I decided to no put something in a magazine publication because I decided that it was ripping people off to make them pay for it first)
:P
I think that when people spend money, and it doesn't matter how much, they like to have something tangible in their hands. A book, a poster, whatever. Having to pay to just look at something. Paying for gif or jpg files arranged on your screen (or flash versions, whatever) just doesn't feel like it has any value. I think people just don't warm up to the concept. Its like the whole DivX thing - it failed because people did NOT like the idea of owning a disk and having to pay for each time they viewed the what was on it. It was like 'I own this, yet I am locked out'. Video Rentals work fine, because we use something tangible, and we return it. We've paid to use something tangible, and we gave it back.
The web is a little similar to that - we expect to be able to access stuff when we go to a site. Successful pay for content sites usually work because the gateway to that content is a subscription fee and you get a LOT of content in return. Webcomics don't work well under that because, well, its hard to produce that much content that quick ^^;;;. Comic require a lot of work of a long period of time. In fact, one of the nice things about comics is that they have the ability to improve over time because the creators get better, and they build a backlist of comics to view - the body of work slowly becomes something of value over time.
By the time you work up to have enough content that is worth charging for, you cant suddenly make your archives pay-only. At least, I personally feel its wrong. Making something that was once free suddenly a pay thing doesn't work, and just makes people feel like they are being used and abused. After all, it's the readers who have been reading and finding the comic and the site that have made it something of value in the fist place.
The micropayment idea is, logically, a wonderful idea - small payments for small bits of content. Biggest problem it has, to me, is that it smacks of metering - people hate being metered. People like to relax while going thru things - ask most people, they'd rather pay a bigger fee for unlimited usage than worry about what their bill will be later - even if it's more expensive in the long run. People spend money emotionally, not with the logic portion of their brain.
People hate 'pay for what you use' models. The more media companies push this idea that it's the viewing of the content that you are paying for, the more people thumb their noses and download mp3s and fire up bittorents of DVD rips.
Making the nature of the digital world work with the way the confluxicated human mind works is not always an easy task. While I said it wont work, I think its very much worth a try. I have a bit of a personal issue with making people pay for anything art related, because I don't feel that just viewing , listening, watching or reading anything creative should ever be paid for - there is enough money to be made in between the cracks with the incidentals that all this worry over actually getting paid for content sometimes puzzles me
Yet, somehow, I've managed to survive, and its not right for me to think that others might do it the same ways I have. Maybe micropayments are the thing, I dunno, I just draw stuff, what do I know
piro
::: fred hides at fredart.com
First, the idea that every website is going to start charging people per page is asinine. The sites that try to nickel and dime you to death will end up in the same graveyard as the sites that try to advertise you to death. Don't you already mentally blacklist websites doused in crazy blinking Flash ads or shoshkeles? Most of us will just add the nickel-and-diming sites to the same pile. And advertising will always make more sense than micropayments for large, brand-oriented sites like CNN.com.
Second, the BitPass model isn't going to spring any sudden credit card surprises on anyone. It's essentially the prepaid phonecard model applied to online content. You buy a BitPass card for as little as $3, spend it in nickels, dimes and quarters on your favorite webcomic, band or online beggar, and you're done. Buy another card if you want, or don't. It's pretty simple.
Third, I've often heard people saying things like "I think an entire cent is too much" for online content and "it better be DAMN well WORTH it!"
Let's get some perspective. Name anything that provides more than 15 seconds worth of enjoyment for a dime. Give it a shot. Even a quarter. What can you buy for a quarter? Anything? You probably couldn't get a hobo to kick you in the nuts for a quarter. Whining about the epic, tragic loss of a dime? That's comical. Griping that even an entire cent is too much to support the artists you like? That's insulting.
Scott's comic is a good example of the value of micropayments. It's worth a quarter; it's not worth $7. There are all kinds of creators out there who are excited about micropayments because they know subscription or donation-based models don't work for them. There are worthwhile websites that aren't ad friendly that are creaking under the strain of overwhelming bandwidth bills. Micropayments enable them to survive and flourish.
Tycho's quote that "if you have enough readers who care about your work to go through all that rigamaroll, you could succeed with any business model" just isn't true. If you have 10,000 readers who are willing to spend 25 cents a month on you, then the only way you're going to get that money is through micropayments. Period. With micropayments, you're a creative indie superstar making a living; without them, you're just another schlub barely keeping his website afloat.
If BitPass succeeds -- and with the engine of webcomics behind them, I think they actually might -- it will change the web. Not in the drastic, market-mad campfire story ways, but in the amount of enjoyment and information we'll be able to squeeze out of the web. There will be more websites worth going to, more musicians being rewarded, more webcomics worth reading, more webloggers not just blogging but reporting.
I'd say that's worth a quarter.
He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.
I don't see this as a micropayment system. In my mind, micropayments are so small that there is no decision involved -- at the most a penny, but normally much less, so for example, projecting into an imaginary future, if micropayments were ubiquitous, a full day of surfing would add up to around the same cost as a day of today's broadband, say, near a dollar for everything for the day.
In your system, you'd be paying 10 cents a comic. However, as I think the guys at Megatokyo recently talked about, there are different ways of viewing a web comic. At first, you're getting into it, and reading all the back story. If they post 3 strips a week, and you're like, 3 years behind, you're looking at 45 bucks just to catch up. Then you're looking at 10 cents a day every time it updates. In your app, going back to look at old comics would be free, as you already paid for them. So, while I definitely see the up side of your system, I think you'd need some kind of bulk-archive rate to make it viable.
Valete!
Fred from MegaTokyo lives from the money he does with it, and charges nothing for readers... Check it out in www.megatokyo.com .
:P
I see that as the different from one who wants to make money for a living, and one who wants to get rich.
Mind Booser Noori
Ok, so if you don't think that the human cost is the reason for failure, why have all the micropayment systems never attained the goal of becoming a widely used net currency?
for 25 cents I can buy a *newspaper*, read multiple syndicated comics and today's news. This is an experiment bound to fail due to an overpriced "micropayment." Try it at 1 cent a day or something with a comic that many people have heard of like Dilbert.
Yes, especially when its an idea as completely retarded as micropayments. How many years have Slashdotters been pining away for this? Four? Five? More?
Face it, nobody wants to be nickle and dimed to death on the web. Micropayments is a solution for content providers that offers no value whatsoever to consumers. Solve a customer problem and the world will beat a path to your door. Trying to force a borken solution for a borken business model on unwilling customers is the dot-comedy road to oblivion.
Micropayments are so 1999.
If you want the secret to success, I'll give it to you -and I won't even charge you a quarter. You know that sublimely flawed lead character in your comic strip? The one who pontificates endlessly on the infinite array of life's idiosyncrasies? Replace him with MegaMan. And while we're replacing stuff you might as well chop out all that ironic, witty humor you seem hopelessly enraptured with and just substitute it with some good ol' fashioned expletives. I'm not sure what it is, but there's just something deliriously funny about Megaman cursing. Trust me here -it's the theme of at least a half dozen highly successful strips.
...
Also, for the love of all that is holy, please stop updating your strip on a regular basis. Sure you've got to create enough interest to keep people coming to your forum (where would we be without the droll debates about oral sex and threesomes?) but definitely quit there. I'd say maybe one strip every two or three weeks. However, make sure to promise a new strip every day. Can't let people think you stopped working on the comic, since then they'll all leave. You could probably get away with 6 months of no updates using this method, easy.
Of course as to how all this will help you earn some money I can't say. But it's not like Mom makes you pay rent, anyway. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to indulge in the adventures of Sonic, that hedonistic Hedgehog
DigiSquid Design.
Cartoon from the '60s. After school. WGN (Chicago). I think it was the same people who did Clutch Cargo (with Spinner and Paddlefoot).
Auuuugghh! Wasted brain cells.
My other car is a 1984 Nark Avenger.
You could probably by one from that american supermarket you mentioned eventually.... once there is a need.
There is a need now. And no, you can't. And the "information superhighway" is littered with the carcasses of companies that tried to fill this "need." Why? because most of'em (paypal included) can't be trusted as far as you could throw their overinflated IPOs.
Internet content is like walking down Mission Beach in Cali with all the street performers (stay with me...). There's so much going on, good and bad, whose hat do you toss your quarter in? A 'donation' system would work so much better if it's promoted as more of a tip. Having recognizable icons we could click on and select amount to tip. These tips would build up until a 30 day cycle and charged to our card. The tip process could show our current tab each time we click the icon. No for some hypothetics (is that a word?): Out of everyone who watches/reads/plays something online, say 20% will drop a 'tip in the jar' after enjoying it, probably only 3% of those would have opted for the prepay method (leaving 97% passing by without making eye contact, including me). We have to get over the fact that potentially 80% of the people will enjoy it and walk on by without tipping. It needs to be an easy process. I followed the first few episodes of "Starship Irregulars" on www.icebox.com until they started the prepay micropayments. If they had an option of 'tipping' I know I would (and have in the past through Amazon) watch a few of their shows and give a little something. I remember giving 'beer money' to Drew over at Fark a long time ago because he asked for it and I enjoy what he's created! There's just something off-putting about prepaying for the unkown. That feeling's amplified when doing it online.
when some shmuck online will give it to you for free... welcome to the age of kazaa where, if it isnt tangible, taking it without paying isnt considered a crime(by people). (im not trolling)
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
Anyone have a mirror?
___ alwaysBETA.com - Hey, you've got nothing better to do.
Why pay when there are free comics?
Because content isn't interchangable. Little 12 year old Billy's Dragonball Z wannabe comic is not the same as Scott McCloud's 'Right Number'. Billy's drek being free doesn't make it more worthwhile than Scott's which is a quarter.
Comic creators can just ask for donations or sell merchandise or adspace - Megatokyo does.
So comics are just a vehicle for pushing merchandise? What if the type of story you're telling doesn't lend itself well to easily marketed chareacters or advertising tie-ins - like Keeping Two or Nowhere Girl? Should the artists adjust their tales so that can accomodate the merchandising? Maybe add some cute, wise-cracking animal sidekicks the way Disney does?
If I was getting something I could keep I might do it. But I don't pay for non-tangible items.
So you've never paid to go to a concert or the theatre. You've never paid admission at a gallery or exhibit. You don't go to the movies. You have no cable tv.
So long as prices are reasonable, I'm willing to pay for an experience. In this case it's the experience of reading a comic. And a quarter for a full-size comic is definitely worth it.
I don't want to pay for something that I don't know will be good
So don't pay. No one's forcing you to.
Unless the person had previous work as proof of their competency or offer some sort of a preview (as subscription site ModernTales does), then they won't be getting money from me unless I see some damn good reviews. If artists are smart, they'd offer the past several strips free and just charge for the archives - until their name is enough of a draw that they can justify charging cash upfront (as is the case with McCloud's comic).
Yar - pirates
If someone wants to rip off the artist - the artist can't really stop 'em. But as McCloud mentioned in his comic on the subject, it requires someone to use their resources and time. If the artists are charging a reasonable rate - I'm willing to assume that most people would ante up the quarter as opposed to hunting for a pirated copy or sharing a pirated copy themselves.
--- No Boom? No Boom today. Boom tomorrow, there's always a boom tomorrow.
As I recall, he made quite a bit of money and he didn't even have to finish the book. Seemed as if it worked well enough..
Twenties Retirement
I actually had a dollar bill mailed to me from France from someone who wanted an account at my site. Another sent a $1 bill from New York.
$0.25 per strip is rediculous. I charge $1.00 to get 30 days of access to anything on my site. $2 for 120, and $5 for 365. I use PayPal to handle on-line transactions.
Sluggy.com has his comics set up in "books." What would make sense (and be easier for all involved) is to charge X dollars for access to a "book" for Y amount of time.
The idea isn't to make money off the comics per se but to recoup the costs of bandwidth. If Joe user wants to pay X dollars and downloads the whole book in Y time then whoop. It's not costing the author bandwidth for the person to view it any more. It shouldn't concern the author that the person who paid once is getting "free" unlimited viewings. It's a book. You wouldn't keep paying the bookstore after you already paid for the book once.
Better to charge a fair price ($5-$15) for a quanity of comics (at least one story line or a few dozen strips whichever is greater) than to make people dick around with quarters.
Micropayments are a nice concept but it's far less of a hassle for all involved to sell things in bulk.
A kid is far more likely to send you $5 in the mail for a comic book worth of comics than to beg his parents for a quarter. The idea is that the fewer channels one has to go through to spend the money, the more likely they are to spend it. Kids would rather not have to explain why they need a "special" quarter. It's a hassle to them and it's a hassle to the parents.
People are also more likely to go through hoops to spend large sums of money than for small quantities of money. I'm not going to drive to Wal-Mart to buy a gumball even though "it's only a quarter." But if I want a DVD then I'll drive even further to get to Best Buy. That's the complete opposite of the micropayment model where the less you're trying to pay the more difficult it is.
Most people would also rather avoid buying "Disney Dollars." They'd rather spend real cash for a real product. Micropayment places don't allow $0.25 transactions. They allows a deposit of tens of dollars (with fees attached on top of that) which $0.25 transactions can be taken from. Which means even though Tommy only needs a special quarter daddy is really giving him a twenty. Daddy would have no problem tossing Tommy a quarter but daddy is going to have to think about that 20. What are the odds daddy can then withdraw $19.75 back out without any fees on top of the quarter he gave Tommy? Zero. One way or another those fees are comming out of your pocket and the company is going to take an additional hit for their own pocket for offering you the service.
The whole business model is currently flawed. Stop playing games and just sell in bulk. If you can't charge at least $1 for it, it's not worth selling on-line. It's that simple. Until credit card fees drop, that's just the reasonable limit. Sell at least $1 worth of product or nothing.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
Further, you can't be sure that you'll get what you pay for when you buy information without having seen it.
When I go to the cinema, I have to pay before I've seen the film. What if it's crap? I can't imagine anyone going to the cinema.
Maybe you could combine micropayment with a rating system. Only people who have paid for the product are allowed to vote on whether it's worth the money.
You want a good alternative? Try the subscription model.
I hate it. I want to buy and keep stuff. I don't want monthly bills. And can a single artist like Scott produce content I want to pay for every month? Well - but you can always offer both - a subscription and pay per view.
That's *only* 800,000 users (the world is a big place) and one more pointless middleman selling people Disney Dollars.
Micropayments turn web-masters into beggers. Is your site that barren that people are more likely to spend a quarter and never come back?
Is it not concievable to you that you have at least $1 worth of merchandise you can sell up front to the customer instead of trying to scrape pennies at a time? Are you putting a gumball machine on-line or what?
If customers are very likely to buy at least $1 worth of merchandise then why not sell it to them up front and give them some free stuff to look at to help encourage the sell?
If you have a $1 worth of merchandise then you don't need Disney Dollars like e-gold. You can give the middle man the middle finger and go straight through PayPal or whatever you want.
Micropayment systems are just breeding potential con-men who turn real money into fools gold and then demand a cut of real money for you to get it back. When CC companies lower their fees then I'll lower my minimum price and offer smaller minimum quanities of my product.
I refuse to make Joe User jump through hoops just so they can spend a quarter and force myself to have to pay Joe Loan Shark AND PayPal for the ability to allow Joe User to do such a thing.
It makes absolutly no sense.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
DigiCash's eCash, CyberCash's CyberCoin, Millicent, nCash (NTT), Paybox, ...
... Will ... Explode ... Flashback ... 199x ... Internet Bubble ...
Head
Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo, leave me alone. Do NOT EVER TRY A MICROPAYMENT A G A I N! Just don't.
On the BitPass site, they sell prepaid "cards" that are just account numbers. Unfortunately, they map to credit cards, or PayPal (which maps to credit cards or bank accounts). So, there's no way to simply place money into their system, without using a credit card or a bank account.
I can walk a block to the local convenience store on the street corner, and have my choice of over a dozen brands of prepaid phone cards! I give the store clerk some cash, and get a prepaid phone card. It is completely anonymous, and nobody has to pay the high fees of credit cards. I don't need to be a certain age, or have a clean credit history, or live in a certain country, to qualify. Anybody can walk in and pay cash for these cards! This is a huge market.
I have often wished I could buy a prepaid "webcard" in the same way. I would buy a card, and it would have a fixed value that would be depleted as I spend it online. It could also function as a normal prepaid phone card, to be used as a wedge to get into stores that only are willing to sell phone cards.
When I can walk into a convenience store and see a stack of prepaid BitPass cards for sale, I will know they have a chance to be successful. People that can't get a credit card will be able to still buy things online. This could be huge for the large number of teenagers that play online games and such! I really hope that BitPass can get their cards into stores, so that they can be bought with cash.
Dr. Demento On The 'Net!
Seems to require at least two middlemen, as opposed to (e.g.) Paypal: first, e-gold, and second, some third party where you can buy e-gold ...
Looking at the billing section the required fields include city, state and zip code but there is no country field so I guess that Bit-Pass does not cater to international payments.
I've been reading and enjoying the (often excellent) work of Scott McCloud for years, but what's this - flash?
That's really a shame, in my opinion - as far as I know (and please, do correct me), there's no flash player for Debian PPC that's up to snuff, free or non-free.
And the page has a lot of text-as-images boxes... last I checked, Scott was pretty good at accessibility and web standards.
I'm kinda bummed now - I've been looking forward to the new McCloud comic for a while but now I can't read it. Maybe I can coax my flatmate to install flash on her Debian x86 machine but (like me) she's usually pretty zealous about free vs non-free software.
Where are my mod-downpoints when I need them most. :(
How about ... nanopayments
Even more affordable and futuristic!
Why doesnt someone create/use a premium rate SMS as a micropayments system. Is there such a system out there? .25c per text) and returned an aurtorization code to your cellphone to access the site/comic.
Eg: A mobile user on a website is interested in content, send sms to number on web site(about
Most kids have cell phones but not credit cards
My two cents
Incorrect A.C.,
That link accepts a payment from you *if* you decide to fill in your account number and passphrase, preview, and then confirm the transaction. Otherwise nothing interesting happens. i.e. there is no hidden benefit to anyone clicking that link.
Other sites have also been experimenting with this sort of thing, like User Friendly's membership program.
So I don't think it's a huge step to get to micropayments - the only real advantage micropayments have over the current methods is that you can try content earlier for lower risk (ie, $.25 vs. $10).
And of course people have mentioned Apple's success with single song downloading. I think people are ready/willing to pay for what they get online, the price just needs to be right.
So you need to borrow a quarter or what?
Even though I'm not a big fan, I'll easily pay 25 cents just to see what the buzz is about.
Don't forget, you're removing the Federal Reserve middleman :)
Not to mention the most price-stable. The same amount of gold that bought a nice toga in Roman times, buys a decent suit today.
I guess you could also just sell your artwork on eBay. Damn.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Bitpass took about 30 seconds to setup (with my already existing paypal account).
The comic itself (art/storyline) is wonderful.
The flash file runs a bit slow on my g4 800mhz, using camino. (once downloaded it runs fine through the stand-alone player)
Scott, if you're reading this...PLEASE remove the litte thumbnail from the center of the canvas. It's really annoying, especially in the "quiet" frames (cityscapes, etc.) where there isn't much scenery.
Thanks Scott!
They are prepaid debit cards, essentially, similar to store gift cards but more generally usable since debit cards are usable nearly everywhere that credit cards are. So, as a teenager, you could buy one of those, because the stores that sell them aren't going to check ID anymore than for a phone card, then probably use it at BitPass (note, I haven't verified this yet) to set up your account.
If you don't have a credit card then no, you can't buy stuff on the internet. What the hell do you want, a bill changer on your PC? How is this different from e-bay, amazon, or anything else for sale on the 'net?
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
So I went and signed up and it was very, very quick and easy. I was reading the comic in less than two minutes. I tried getting out of it, getting back in (with the cookie intact) was a matter of seconds. Since I wipe my cookies every day I'll soon see how a cold start is on something I've already paid, but from this experience I doubt it will take even half a minute to get back in. A very fair deal as far as I'm concerned. You just select a bank amount and enter the minimal credit card info.
You can risk as little as a few bucks, so even if you are a skeptic, if you think having micropayments be available might be cool and useful, I say take a tiny risk and sign up. We can argue all day about whether it will ever fly, but if you believe it could and should, then make the most compelling argument and get your own account.
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
I'll be checking into the "Share" Link on the Bitpass.com site frequently to support other vendors that sign on to this.
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
I can go down to 7-11 and pay cash for a prepaid phone card. The card has a many-digit number on the back, and when I want to make a call I gotta type in that number. This is a bit of a pain, but the entire system works without me having to give up a CC number or even my name.
This is how I want web micropayments to work. I wanna go to 7-11 for beer, and a weekend of webcomics. Nicely anonymous.
I don't think eCash or iCash (which term is prefered?) can work globally, across the internet on an anonymous or even a somewhat anonymous basis, the way regular currency does. Here's my thinking...
To be accepted, whole and undisputed, currency needs to be backed by someone or something that we trust. That's why a $5.00 bill is accepted as being worth $5.00 by Bill Gates, Steve Jobs or Joe Schmoe. The US Government backs the bill. The reason eCash won't work is because it's not backed by the government, but by corporations. And corportate eCash simply doesn't instill the same sense of trust that government-backed currency does.
I see no future for concepts such as eCash without the backing of the government.
Um, e-gold charges less than the middleman you suggest, which is PayPal. e-gold also works internationally, and has greater velocity than PayPal (see stats.e-gold.com for details). Finally, there's a www.paypalwarning.com but no www.e-goldwarning.com for good reasons...
odds
Thanks to public education, they probably think the Federal Reserve ISN'T a private corporation...
To be honest, I wasn't very familiar with Scott or his comics, but after having read the article I decided to take a look and try out this micro-payment thing. So I clicked through to the BitPass site, and dropped my Visa number to get a $3.00 credit. Pretty quick and painless. I also noted that Paypal is an option also.
Now, having gone through the payment process, I clicked the button again and was taken right to Scott's comic. The Flash transition of the pages is pretty cool. It's easy to read, and turning the page with the click of a key is not a bad way to read a comic. I even liked the story. It was a good way to start my day, reading a nice little mini novella with a main character that I can relate to - being all into the mathematical probabilities and stuff.
And it was only 25 fucking cents!
I think I'm going to become a regular reader of his comics now, and any other author who can make this kind of cool content available in a cool and affordable way.
I've been reading some posts where people still complain about the stuff not being free, or how the micropayment stuff won't work because sniff, it won't work for teenagers who don't have a credit card, or whine, what about my european currency transfer rate? While it is their right to complain, the fact is that this kind of technology is GOOD. The RIAA and MPAA should take note.
Check out Paypal's Fees for Recieving Payments for Businesses. You pay 2.9% plus a 30 cent transaction fee. Meaning that selling a 25 cent webcomic will cost you about 31 cents. Paypal is good for a lot of things, but it's not a micropayment service.
(As a side note, if you need another reason to support BitPass, they're powered entirely by open source software. I like that.)
PayPal has 10 Million members that you can send your money too, while BitPass currently only has three.
Well, Paypal once had only 3 members, too.
But you've got a point. It doesn't matter how sweet the implementation of a micropayment service is if there aren't many people using it. So I'm building a BitPass User Group website to facilitate adoption of it. Interested parties can check out my journal for details.
He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.
The best thing about micropayments is that you change who pays for a publication. Every publication out there is paid by advertisers. They must conform to the payer (lack of) values. If the payer of a publication is the final consumer, it has to satisfy the consumer. The final result? Media and art independence.
Not exactly "anonymous." No, wait... not even a little "anonymous."
BitPass will allow you to purchase one of their cards and send it to someone else... so, presumably, you would have to have the parent buy the prepaid card and send it to their kid...
What Scott is doing a great idea, at the right time. See...the web 2 years ago was free! Hooray. However free can't provide for hosting fee, labor spent etc. So things began to cost money.
But you can't charge 5 dollars when another person is willing to give it free.
Like Bestbuy selling 400 dollar computer, when CompUsa gives it away free.
Bad example, but that's how the net was then, and now. It's changing, but slowly. That's why Scott Mccloud's idea is genius....Charge 25 cents...its not much, but enough to turn SOME profit.
The only problem is, I didn't pay 25 cents for the comic, I paid 3 dollars....
Wait, how you ask!? No, he doesn't charge 3 dollars. But I have 2.75 that I can't use anywhere else [except for some music site that I'm not interseted in]. So I have 2.75 that will sit in Bitpass forever unless other sites use it.
Wait....So is this an incentive for other sites to start putting Bitpass...I mean I have 2.75 sitting there. What am I going to do with...Its gone as far as I'm concerend. So I hope that most sites understand that quickly signing up with Bitpass makes sense.
Well that's what I think...