I remember reading a comic strip, I think it was in the early 2000s, that was trying to explain the future concept of micro-transactions.
It was pretty well drawn, and over several panels that you had to scroll through, it explained how the Internet could work with micro-transactions. I’m not 100% sure that was the word used, but the focus was on people paying eachother for creative works. I think it feature a drawn version of the author himself explaining.
It did turn out that some people got payed for their creative works on the Internet, but not in quite that way. It would he interesting to see the strip again, if anyone could remember it.
I’m wondering if it might have been part of Scott McCloud’s comic-based books on the comics industry, Understanding Comics and Reinventing Comics – particularly the latter, as my recollection is that, in that second book, he talked about the importance of micro-transactions.
I can’t find that specific page with a Google image search, but here are a couple of examples of McCloud’s style in those books:
It’s kinda weird that 20 years later, we still don’t have an extremely low-friction microtransaction system. PayPal is probably the closest, but it still requires logging in, going through a bunch of security steps, and then a few extra payment steps. Nothing close to “click this button to send a quarter to the author”. All that extra stuff makes sense for a $100 transaction, but not for <$1.
There are some alternative systems, like Patreon (more of a subscription thing) and the real-time donation systems on YouTube and Twitch, but nothing quite like what the author described.
The issue is that the greatest source of friction in a microtransaction system is not “how do I pay for this” - that could be taken care of technically - but rather “should I pay for this?”
As an example, I pay ~$7/month each year to read lwn.net a/k/a Linux Weekly News. I probably read one article a day on average. In theory, a micropayment model for reading lwn.net articles at $0.20 each could save me money.
But I would spend time more time dithering over whether or not this article I’m looking at the preview for right now would be worth that micropayment. And if I started reading a spate of articles in a row I’d start getting worried that I should have taken the subscription for this month or year (assuming, of course, that a subscription option is still offered).
With the subscription, I think about it once a year and make my decision. Much less time taken up than if I consider 300 times a year if this article is the one that I really want to read for today.
I agree that there’s a mental friction problem and that McCloud’s ideas about paying for one comic at a time don’t make a lot of sense. Still–paying $1-2 for the next month of comics would not be so bad. Or–you agree to pay 10 cents each, automatically tracked, up to a maximum of $2/mo where you simply get access to everything for the month. No real commitment aside from the initial 10 cents, no risk of some giant bill after you’ve binged the whole site, no significant mental friction, etc.
That’s not all that different from Patreon, except there’s still a fair amount of payment rigamarole there, and no gradual increase up to the base subscription level.
I dunno; it seems to me that there’s a lot less mental friction for a one-comic-at-a-time small tip than for a big monthly or yearly subscription. Consider the real-world analogue: When I go to a farmer’s market or similar event and there’s a musician there with a tip jar or open guitar case or the like, it’s easy to toss in a buck each time, but I don’t know if I’d toss in $15 for a whole summer’s worth of farmers’ market music.
Which is why I argued for a hybrid approach–small one-at-a-time transactions up to some (still fairly small) monthly maximum. I don’t want to set up an ongoing subscription to a comic I’m not sure about. I also don’t want to pay 10 cents at a time for a comic I enjoy. It’s not enough that I’m worried about the loss for a comic I end up not liking, but at the same time it’s too much ongoing friction for something I do like, and I also don’t want to end up with a $200 bill if I somehow got engrossed and binged the entire archives.
My phone plan is sorta like this, aside from the baseline charges. I pay for data by the gigabyte. Mostly it stays at low levels, and I don’t think about the costs. If for whatever reason (travel, etc.) I have high data use in that month, there’s a maximum charge, so I don’t have to worry about getting a $1000 bill, either. Overall, it’s a relaxed way of handling billing.
I can agree with you on that, but that hybrid is not really a micropayments model. Certainly there are plenty of subscription models which start with a low-cost introductory period and then transition into full cost later - heck, Publishers Clearing House made enough money with that model to give huge sums away every year.
Of course, you’re not necessarily committing yourself to go to the farmer’s market that summer, nor does your $15 contribution commit the tipped musician to play that market the rest of the summer, especially to be sure to be there on the days you’re there as well.
I also think there may be some more personal connection associated with giving a token amount of money than in clicking on a button on a web site, but I’d have to consider how that might affect the process.
My suggestion is sorta the opposite, though. The one-at-a-time rate is higher than the subscription rate. And there’s nothing stopping a person from remaining in the one-at-a-time region–maybe someone isn’t a comic junkie, they just occasionally like to see what’s out there, or maybe their friends suggest they check out a chapter now and then. In that case the author still gets the 50 cents or whatever the individual instances would have cost. But that only works if there’s really a zero-friction payment model.
