Cool Tech

Micropayments and the gift economy

I just wrote a reaction to Clay Shirky's latest essay "Fame vs Fortune: Micropayments and Free Content" on my O'Reilly weblog:

Finally, Shirky argues that micropayents present unreasonable mental transaction costs -- if you're constantly thinking about the worth of a piece of content in terms small fractions of a dollar, it does get pretty tedious. In a gift economy the content consumer can decide how much to donate to the content producer, since the consumer is not held to some arbitrary price. I can see creating systems where the mental transaction costs can be shrunk to a small one time mental transaction cost.

For instance, when the user sets up their gift economy based micropayment account the user should be able to set a standard donation price for various pieces of content. A weblog entry could be 1/100th of cent. An image 1/10th of cent. An article a nickel. A song $.25. A movie could be priced at at $1. Whatever the user decides.

After the user ingested piece of content, the software/website/whatever could ask the user: "Was this article what you expected? (Totally, mostly, marginally, not at all)" If the user responds with totally the entire predetermined amount gets donated to the content creator. 66% for mostly, 33% for marginally and nothing for not at all.

Check it out!

Posted by Mayhem at September 15, 2003 12:46 AM