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A comment on Now Can We All Agree That The "High Quality Web Content" Experiment Has Failed?. Parent comment

Re:Now Can We All Agree That The "High Quality Web Content" ... by william42 on Thursday September 01, 2011 @02:50AM (#2948912)
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.

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Re:Now Can We All Agree That The "High Quality Web Content" ... by protomyth on Thursday September 01, 2011 @05:54PM (#2951963)
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.
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Re:Now Can We All Agree That The "High Quality Web Content" ... by william42 on Sunday September 04, 2011 @01:50AM (#2958894)
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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