the main holdup i think is truly effortless and secure, private, and widely accepted micropayments.
there's plenty of stuff i'd be willing to pay for if it didn't involve creating yet another account and giving them my credit card info.
there's plenty of stuff i'd be willing to pay for if it didn't involve creating yet another account and giving them my credit card info.
https://web.archive.org/web/20030911092002/http://www.shirky...
First, for large classes of media, the energy required to consume the media is much larger than the mental cost of even an explicit microtransaction - e.g. the energy required to decide whether or not I want to pay 10c to watch a 10 minute educational video is dwarfed by the energy spent watching the video itself, and probably comparable to the cost of watching 10 seconds of ads beforehand.
Second, for many of the media for which the opposite is true (e.g. short TikTok videos), you can make an argument that the value of those media is very low anyway.
Third, for short media that is still valuable, the cost can be amortized through either buying chunks all at once (e.g. the algorithm pre-computes a feed of 30 minutes of video and tells you the cost, and you can decide whether to watch or not), or through other technical solutions like setting a "payment limit" for the day - there are lots of ways that you can get creative with this.
Fourth, as for "I have to believe it would have been solved" - there are many, many problems that could be solved through technically superior solutions that aren't, because of external forces (monopolies on a market, manufacturing difficulties, lack of a market, economic dis-incentives for either sellers or buyers, band-wagoning/legacy baggage that people are emotionally attached to, etc).
I think that the answer is much simpler - people don't want to pay for content. People want it to be free. And, currently, most people (at least based on my interpersonal experiences) either don't know how much of their data is being harvested in order to pay for their zero-dollar-cost services, don't care, or do care but not enough to push for a micropayment solution.
EDIT: As an entirely separate point from what I wrote above, I think that the mental transaction costs would actually be useful (even if people hate them), because they'd disincentivize tiny chunks of content (due to the overhead of the decision being much higher relative to the length of the content), and incentivize long-form, thoughtful content, which would have a number of beneficial effects.
I'm not sure we're even disagreeing. Of course, people want things to be free as the default condition. Which is what sets up the mental transaction cost when something isn't free. And we see this in all sorts of settings. It's quite well established that there's a bigger gulf between free and really cheap than there is between really cheap and just cheap.
To clarify: I'm arguing against the idea of people not liking the mental transaction costs being the primary reason why microtransactions haven't been adopted (which is the point that I thought that you were making). I agree that the monetary costs themselves are the primary reason.
It didn’t work, obviously, but mostly because people just don’t want to pay. Not even if a typical cost is single digit dollars per month, or less.
We’re already starting to see this model with Substack and Medium, and I’m not sure if it’s a better model, or just a different one.
Are you sure about that? I reckon a lot of people didn't know it existed.
In the case of something like YouTube, they'd want vastly more (and as a monthly subscription) to remove the ads than they'd earn from an average user watching the ads.
The alternative might have been a 'watch without ads' button, allowing a truly small transaction (a few cents) to watch a specific video without ads.
For all the BS projects google has spent money on, then just killed off, a micropayment system should be easy.
> all-you-can-eat subscription services
Then give an alternative AYCE option too. Just implement micropayment caps. e.g. When total monthly micropayments are => $10, cap it at that amount until some other thresh-hold. Allow pre-payments. easy.
Low-friction payment methods are here. Apple and Google Pay for example work pretty well. But if I pay for access to something today, how do you know it's me when I return a year later and want access again?
A good password manager can make creating an account almost effortless. Maybe that's part of the solution.
Yet another reason why identity verification by default would make the net better. No spam, easy payments, elimination of middle-men for many use cases.
I know that creating an account isn't adding _much_ friction, but there is some and I could see myself appreciating this.
Notice that they said "yet another account" - I'm pretty sure that they're not objecting to the idea of creating a single account for the micropayments service, but instead creating a separate account for each individual service that they could instead use micropayments for.
> A good password manager can make creating an account almost effortless. Maybe that's part of the solution.
That was already excluded by their comment - "and giving them my credit card info" - wherein it's made clear that part of the problem is the proliferation of private data among a very large number of individual sites/services/systems. A password manager doesn't do anything at all to help secure your private information from these services that you would be signing up for.
There is the privacy aspect too. Maybe I don't want [big sketchy data] to be able to buy my CC purchases and see know which creators i support.
SecurityNow did a podcast about it (episode 477).
I'm not sure whether or not Google & Apple pay are "micro-" enough, though. Do they charge per-transaction fees that are significant enough that 5 cent transactions are infeasible? What's the transaction time like? Can you set up 1-click payments?
I've certainly imagined a central micropayment system that I could just see what is being used, how much, manage it all... but otherwise just use services seamlessly (the traditional cart experience seems a bit jarring in many cases) and still pay the creators for their work .