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Comment by notatoad | Hacker News Reader

>What advocates of microtransactions don't see: It turns something that absolutely should not be a commodity (creative work), into a commodity.

as an advocate for microtransactions: yes, i see this. but i think you've got it backwards. nobody is "turning creative work into a commodity". it already is, and creators and marketplaces are both happy to treat it like one when they're selling their work. Creatives don't like micropayments because they don't like to so explicitly acknowledge that their work output is a commodity.

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Pff, I love Patreon and I feel like that is basically "micropayments that actually work". If you look at Scott McCloud's original proposal for micropayments ([1], parts 5/6), the only thing that's really not viable is the idea that every reader paying 25¢/mo would work - in practice, transaction fees mean that about $2/mo is the minimum viable payment to actually mean something, especially when you factor in that you are not going to get every reader to pay. Luckily it turns out that you can also get some readers to pay $5/$10/$50/mo, or even more.

(Factoring in inflation, that $2/mo now was about $1.12 back in 2000 when McCloud proposed the idea.)

1: http://scottmccloud.com/1-webcomics/icst/index.html

> in practice, transaction fees mean that about $2/mo is the minimum viable payment to actually mean something

another person who doesn't know about PayPal's micropayment account fees. They save us (ardour.org) about 23c per US$1 transaction, and we get the majority of our income from US$1 transactions. Instead of the usual 3.5% + 49c fixed fee on the order of 30c, PayPal' structure for this is more like 9c fixed + 4.99%.

If I was a believer in some deity that paid attention to such things, I would pray daily that PayPal does not decide to end these at some point.

Good news is that they now offer something called Dynamic Pricing, where instead of maintaining two accounts and choosing which one to use based on the transaction value, they will now do this automatically for you. Subject to approval, they say.

9c fixed + 4.99% is ~10.2 cents fee for the proposed 25 cents/mo micropayment in the post you're replying to. How is that good? It's better, sure, but that's still handing over 41% of your income to PayPal.

The number cited in the parent comment was US$2/month. We have roughly 3k subscriptions at US$1/month, and although we'd love to collect more of the revenue, I don't find myself thinking that PP's micropayment structure is untenable for this.

Yes, for 25c payments, especially one-off's, the systems are not there at this time.

The EU is working on "digital euro", which is meant to be free of transaction fees. I would rather see a 0.1% transaction fee to cover the costs, but at least it should make micropayments viable.

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