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Comment by william42 | Hacker News Reader

Micropayments in general are doomed to fail.

http://www.shirky.com/writings/fame_vs_fortune.html

An article from 2003 - that doesn't mention Readability, Flattr, and other new takes on micropayments - is your final word on why micropayments are doomed to fail?

Sometimes it's useful to revisit an idea and look at it with an open mind. The landscape has changed. Perhaps micropayments as they exist in 2011 are doomed to fail as well but I wouldn't jump to that conclusion based on a single 8 year old article.

From the user's perspective, Readability is a subscription service(one that uses pay-what-you-want, but the default is five dollars per month--far from 'micro') and Flattr is a form of donation(notice that it is completely voluntary, unless I am misreading what flattr actually does). Neither are actually micropayments. Both subscription and donation were mentioned in that very Clay Shirky article.

The closest thing to micropayments that has had any success whatsoever have been pay-what-you-want like Radiohead's In Rainbows and the Humble Indie Bundles and even there they get most of their money from the small segment that pays a lot, effectively as a form of donation that subsidizes the people who wish to only pay $0.01(or in Radiohead's case $0)

I have come to my conclusion in 2011 the same way Clay Shirky did in 2003: the trails of dead micropayment services.

I would actually submit that their has been no true micro-payments service other than some credit systems (e.g. XBox Marketplace). Is there a place to sell documents, audio, or video for 5 to 10 cents a piece and getting 60 - 80%? I believe the paper from 2003 is not a predictor of what would happen in Amazon or Apple would have such a system. Both have excellent UI and easy process in buying higher priced media.

UI isn't the problem. The problem is that free is significantly more attractive than even $0.01 and always will be; this has been shown through studies such as this:

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.164...

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