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Micropayment for a Twitter Joke?
I watched a micropayment related joke pass around Twitter, and I was both amused and offended. The tweet?
“Just so you guys know — I’m switching to micropayments, because [REST OF JOKE CURRENTLY LOCKED. PLEASE INSERT ONE DOLLAR.]” (via @aedison)
Why was I amused?
The implied sentiment is appropriate given the discussion of paywalls for journalism. Heck, even @charlesarthur the technology editor at The Guardian joined in. Rumors and outright statements about charging for blog or news content have been circulating from several media outlets. Rupert Murdoch stated that all of his newspaper properties would start charging for access to their websites. The Financial Times is leaning in the same direction.
When you think about the joke, it’s silly that people would charge for news or news blogs, but potentially even sillier to charge for microblogs and tweets.
Why would I be offended?
The current discussion around micropayments is yet another round in a series of micropayments debates and discussions. This time it’s literally micropayments 3.0, and it is a little offensive to see the same old arguments and jokes about micropayment pros and cons popping up without any reference to the previous analysis and commentary.
Not only did my colleagues and I debate and discuss those same issues for micropayments 2.0, but we had to revisit, clarify, and rehash the debates that arose during the micropayments 1.0. Each time there were academics that developed equations and user models about the mental transaction costs, usability issues, massive transaction volume requirements, reader commitment development, engagement development, pre-pay vs. post-pay issues, banked vs. unbanked considerations, and more. All of those are valid issues and worthy of debate; however at the end of the day, the real proof is in the pudding. Micropayments didn’t work for many, but did micropayments work for anyone?
The BitPass team and I can definitely say “Yes”: micropayments work for the right type of company and content. We had customers in many content verticals and analyzed the buying patterns and demographics of users and the selling and conversion patters of merchants. The simplest answer to what sold was exclusive content from trusted merchants. When there was no exclusivity, users went elsewhere to find the content for free. When the users trusted a merchant and knew ahead of time the quality of the content, they were willing to pay for it.
The butt of the joke
Would I pay for the answer from any “joe” on Twitter? No, but I might pay to get @aedison’s punch line since her content is generally good and I trust her to deliver some quality. This leads me to the other popular category at BitPass: entertainment. People tend to pay for entertainment if it’s exclusive, if they respected the content creator, and if they thought the content creator would benefit from their payment.
All joking aside, I hope that the media companies keep in mind their products’ appeal and audience while they consider whether micropayments are feasible within their market.
“Just so you guys know — I’m switching to micropayments, because [REST OF JOKE CURRENTLY LOCKED. PLEASE INSERT ONE DOLLAR.]”
122 characters including spaces.
“it is a little offensive to see the same old arguments and jokes about micropayment pros and cons popping up without any reference to the previous analysis and commentary”
is there space for a reference?
Basically there’s alot if your search the terms and phrases in the text:
“Each time there were academics that developed equations and user models about the mental transaction costs, usability issues, massive transaction volume requirements, reader commitment development, engagement development, pre-pay vs. post-pay issues, banked vs. unbanked considerations, and more.”
You can narrow the search by adding the terms clay shirky, scott mcloud, jakob nielsen, bitpass, peppercoin, click-n-buy, ala carte, qpass, etc.
To many, the space has been beaten to death, to many others, history has no lessons. At a minimum, discussing this topic gives me something to write about.