Showing posts with label micropayments. Show all posts
Showing posts with label micropayments. Show all posts

14 April 2007

Google + DoubleClick = GoogleClick

One consequence of Google's rather expensive acquisition of DoubleClick is that it turns the company from a search engine that sells ads into an advertising company that happens to have a search engine.

During Web 1.0, the accepted wisdom was that online advertising would never be viable as a revenue stream - the "real" money would have to come from somewhere else, such as subs or content purchased through micropayments. It will be interesting to see how things develop during Web 3.0...

25 November 2006

The Game God Speaks

I am not a gamer. Until recently, I had no idea who Raph Koster was. But the more I read of his stuff, the more impressed I am: he is clearly one of the deepest thinkers about the digital world today. Note that I do not say about games: for what he writes has ramifications far beyond the gaming world, and should be read by anyone with an interest in things digital.

Take his latest post, called "Are microtransactions actually the future?" This pieces ranges widely, touching on all the big issues that intellectual monopolies like copyright throw up. And he really gets it. For example:

since anything that can be seen by our senses can be reproduced, for better or worse, all digital forms of enforcing copyright are doomed to fail. Every form of encryption is moot, because everything must be decrypted in order for us to see it. At some point, the data is in the clear, and then it can be copied.

He then goes further, offering a suggestion about how content industries can and must cope with this ineluctable fact:

The value is in the service, not the content. In the service, not the microtransactions. A digital item is worth nothing. What is of value is the context. People are increasingly not willing to pay for the experience of hearing a song by itself in the abstract. They pay for the concert as a whole (the iTunes experience as a whole, the CD experience as a whole, the movie-going experience as a whole, the EverQuest experience as a whole), and it will be smart venue operators who survive and make the money in the long run.

Amen to that.

03 October 2006

Eyeballs as Micropayments

Here's a post that wraps up a lot of ideas.

I've often wondered why micropayments have never taken off. Personally, I'd be fine with the idea, and I can't believe I'm the only one. But they haven't, even though various technologies have been around for over a decade.

Maybe eyeballs are the solution. That is, the attention economy creates a de facto micropayment system without the need for a complicated infrastructure:

Money is a very important and useful medium of exchange for high-value, tangible products. For small-value, intangible products, the costs tend to exceed the value of the transactions—especially when you add in the overhead associated with making payments at a distance. Fortunately, human beings are clever. We’ve begun to find a variety of substitutes for money that work better in cyberspace. This isn’t the repeal of market economics, but rather an extension of them to deal with changed circumstances.

(Via Luis Villa's Blog.)

09 May 2006

Painless Micropayments

This is nice: a system that lets you pay tiny amounts to sites as you float through them - without needing to do anything.

Nice, because it all happens in the background; nice because it builds on the fundamental assumption that people are, well, nice. (Via Bubblegeneration.)