Reading Notes: Micropayments Critique
From: http://shirky.com/writings/fame_vs_fortune.html
* many micropayment startups have failed
* "they failed because the trend
towards freely offered content is an epochal change, to which
micropayments are a pointless response."
* the act of buying anything, even
if the price is very small, creates what Nick Szabo calls mental
transaction costs, the energy required to decide whether something is
worth buying or not, regardless of price.
* b/c everyone is a creator, value of individual chunks of content is much reduced. "
Free content is thus what biologists call an evolutionarily stable
strategy."
