Money for something

[mmcirvin]

Clever net pontificator Clay Shirky famously disbelieves in the viability of micropayments. Clever cartoonist Scott McCloud famously disagrees, and notices that part of the problem is the shifty definition of the term, which creates strawmen. Nobody seems to think that invisible penny-a-click pricing will ever work (I agree), but McCloud uses the term to refer to charging a quarter for a comic, too (and points out that this is the specific model preferred by BitPass, the system that Shirky is denigrating).

Slumbering Lungfish muses amusingly on the debate, and suggests that the real problem is the age-old one: everyone thinks he's an artist, and few will be successful at it. The Web makes the vanity publishing model cheap enough to be respectable (though not free, as McCloud stresses). But try to go beyond that, and unless you've got something special, you end up with "beer money and a clique".

I haven't been inclined lately to try to make money off my creative work. But that's just because of accidental things: I have a pretty good day job, and I'm pretty sure that I'm never going to be such a superstar from my extracurricular activities that the expense of it wipes me out. I suppose that either circumstance could change.

Comments

[jwgh]

Once 'Chalice of Fire' hits the top of the charts prog-rockers everywhere will be clamoring to record your latest composition!

I think he's gone off the right trail

[jecook]

Analog publishing generates per-unit costs -- each book or magazine requires a certain amount of paper and ink, and creates storage and transportation costs. Digital publishing doesn't. Once you have a computer and internet access, you can post one weblog entry or one hundred, for ten readers or ten thousand, without paying anything per post or per reader. In fact, dividing up front costs by the number of readers means that content gets cheaper as it gets more popular, the opposite of analog regimes.

Clay makes a rather large mistake here, and that is he is forgetting the cost of publishing a web comic or any content on the web. You have to have a server, or space on a server. You have to have bandwidth to connect the server (and the more popular your content is, the more bandwidth you will need. Ever hear of the slashdot effect??)So, you do pay a penalty per user above a certain point.

free content is growing in both amount and quality -- is what's actually happening.
Sure, it's growing in amount, but quantity does not necessarily mean quality. I needed to do some research on how feline vision worked. It took me 20 minutes to find the site that had the information I wanted, and it was on the second page of google's results.

In addition, he's obviously making references to people who are new to the idea of self publishing, not those who have been around, and have found that offering free content does not keep the server or IS bills paid for. Scott McCloud has been around for a while, and his work is very good. It's worth paying for. THere are several others (Bill Holbrook, Illiad, Pete Abrams, and many more that have found other ways to charge for their work, in order to keep a popular site running, but the base content is still free.

Re: I think he's gone off the right trail

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Yes, the real per-user cost was one of McCloud's major points. I think part of the disagreement has to do with the type of content these people are used to. Shirky is mostly a writer; McCloud works in a graphic medium that chews up more bandwidth and space. Just try to distribute video and you'll see how far a flat capital investment gets you.

Re: I think he's gone off the right trail

[jecook]

I'll certainly agree there.

words are very cheap, and compress well. All the stuff I've written, including a backup copy of some older stuff, would fit on a floppy disk twice over.

The images in my gallery occupy around 43 mb, with the coding for it taking up some 620 odd kb. and a short video from my "cheap" DV camcorder runs about 200 MB per minute uncompressed.