I get down sometimes about poor financial decisions of my past. Like so many Americans, I have a solid chunk of unsecured credit debt, the cumulative legacy of every impatient purchases over two decades, an extra little financial burden that hangs over me wherever I may go.
From the basement files of the Department of How Much Worse Could it Get comes the tale of one James Burt, a hapless 24-year-old from Queensland Australia, to make me feel better about my life choices. Mr. Burt got his hands on an early release of Nintendo’s New Super Mario Brothers for Wii and decided it would be a very bright stunt to put it on a file-sharing network.
This probably seemed like a great idea until Nintendo’s anti-piracy ninjas pulled a blue turtle shell out of their bag of tricks and hunted poor James Burt down. The final disposition of this youthful indiscretion recently made the rounds of the embarrassingly rich fields of the video game news circuit: Nintendo arrived at an out-of-court settlement with Mr. Burt to pay their legal bill of $100,000... and $1.5 million AU damages for Nintendo’s lost sales. “We would like to play” indeed.
My mind is filled with questions by these kinds of stories. Like, what the hell is Nintendo threatening you with that you “settle” for a million and a half in red ink against your lifetime net worth? Did they they finagle some secret copyright arrangement with the Australian government where if you fail to settle they can have you torn apart by wild dogs? Why not $1.5 billion? Is it any more likely that a mid-twenties Australian gamer is going to be able to pay that off? Is it just meant to be cautionary news, is this individual headed directly to bankruptcy, making the specifics irrelevant? Can you bankrupt your way out of that kind of agreement? Did Nintendo present this kid with a payment plan? Does James Burt’s punishment include a lifetime banning from the Mii network?
There are all sorts of directions to go with this about copyright violation and reasonable consequences, but I have to admit I’ve become utterly bored with that whole conversation. Bogus as the system is, I’ve run out of compassion for the illicit file-sharing set as well. These people are not exactly Robin Hood and his Merry Men. Do something interesting with all this unbridled new media power, okay, or don’t come whining to me when you get stepped on for trying to abscond with the giant’s golden-egg-laying hen. Unfortunately this leaves me without a pithy moral. Except, perhaps: Don’t Fuck with Mario.
Sunday, February 21, 2010
Saturday, February 20, 2010
Micropayments: a bad idea that will not die
I received a notification today that Tipjoy, my second foray as an early adopter of a micropayments strategy, was going under (and that if I didn’t redeem my pathetic little barely used account balance it would vanish, probably to displace a tiny portion of some beleaguered founder’s credit card balance. So I went and transferred my $4.80 right back into PayPal, because, you know, like that’s my problem). I’m far from oblivious to the irony that the whole ineffectual experiment was transacted via what is essentially a functional (if fee heavy and intermittently evil) small transaction provider.
I signed up for Tipjoy somewhat reluctantly, at the motivation of a friend, because I had been through definitive micropayment disappointment as a beta seller and buyer for the now several-years-dead Bitpass. I set up a musicians account on their Mperia store experiment. I bought anything I could remotely justify “owning” (as much as you own data). I bought micropayment cheerleader Scott McCloud’s pay per view webcomic experiment The Right Number and I’m still waiting for him to finish the story. I paid serial project-abandoner Patrick Farley for his Pokemon-Revelations mashup Apocamon - I don’t ever expect to see the end of that one. I bought music of dubious quality (though there were a couple of rough gems in the slag).
Bitpass left a particularly bad taste in my mouth because prior to closing up shop they quietly instituted account-hoovering fees - account inactivity fees, low balance fees - and I had to go raise hell to get them to give me back the money they had taken, which wasn’t much, less than twenty dollars, but which I felt obligated to demand on general principles. So at least Tipjoy got something right.
And now I see there are another couple going concerns out there, Kachingle and flattr (and I suppose there are more obscure contenders). My faith in these enterprises can be assessed by the fact that I won’t even go to the trouble of adding hyperlinks to their sites. You know how to use Google. I will note that Flattr comes from the mind of one of the founders of the Pirate Bay, which is so damn funny it deserves a post all its own, aside from the fact that it doesn’t really matter and will be defunct in just a few short years.
Let’s get into the history of micropayments as it stretches back to the mid 1990s. I’ll break down the evolution of these various strategies to collect small amounts of money from a large base of users and distribute them to content providers, and explain how these most recent start-ups have taken the lessons of the failures of their predecessors, and tapped into the robust and contentious discussions that have circled the internet, featuring heady concepts like the mental accounting barrier, and how their strategies differ from what has gone before.
Hah, yeah, right. Hey, maybe I’m wrong, and everyone will be Flattr’d and Kachingling this time next year and you can all come back and laugh and throw mocking quarters at the ubiquitous buttons I have been sheepishly compelled to add to all my projects. No. I know these people think they have figured out the core problems with micropayments, or “crowdfunding” or whatever they want to call it. They think they will change the game because they have eliminated paywalls and made everything voluntary and instituted the customer-selected price point and made it so easy to pay. Like all the foundered ships before them they have focused on the quality of the individual transaction of a consumer at a content site. These are deck chair on Titanic solutions, lipstick on pig solutions. Let’s take a look at the sow underneath. Here’s how it breaks down.
Number one problem: the content is not worth paying for. That’s the meanest way to put it but there it is. Bloggers, podcasters, webcomic artists, sub-indie label musicians set the price already at zero. There’s too much of it. Nobody is really asking to pay for it. The majority of people who think they should get paid for it can just put a donation button on their site. The tiny percentage of people who want to pay for the pleasure have already applied the button. Sites with sufficiently high value content and high volume traffic to make it worth the effort to formally “monetize” already do so with the methods that work, advertising and merchandising.
The transaction systems all break down on two points, neither of which are what ever get addressed by the fixes for a simple reason: they aren’t fixable by any small third-party intermediary. First, you have to sign up. Every day my resistance to sign-ups gets higher. Sign ups are something I have to maintain, I have to keep track of logins and passwords and update them if my email changes. They are potential weaknesses in the eternal battle to hold a line on my privacy and security. My online history is littered with pointless sign-ups I never used and which served no purpose, and every time I’m solicited to set up another one I ask, with increasing self-interest, what am I getting out of doing this? In this case I then go and take a look at their (always poorly framed, disorganized) content rosters. Which returns us to problem number one.
Second, if I do sign up, I have to maintain some sort of account. I have to transact real money into this thing so that I have something to spend (or pay off something I owe). Should I trust you to hold on to my credit card information? Is what you have to offer compelling enough to get me to sign up for a repeating transaction on some kind of subscription basis? Right now the enterprises that have earned this position are Apple (via iTunes and Apps), eMusic and Amazon. For random one-off small transactions PayPal already exists. Take a look at problem number one and guess what your chances are.
Next problem: the support transaction itself invites me to do something I have become incredibly proficient at avoiding. I have to notice a thing to click and then click it. If you’ve gotten all clever and made it some sort of optional pay-what-you-like scheme then I have to make a decision on top of that. At some point along the line I have to have signed up. On the internet I am ignoring this sort of thing all the live long day. Advertisement clicks, donation button clicks, partners and affiliate clicks, take a survey clicks. I find the content on the page and pay attention to that.
What it all adds up to is work and money for something I’m used to getting for free. Which brings us to the last but not least point: a significant percentage of your best potential customers and clients have been burned by the assholes who have gone before you. I honestly can’t think what anyone would have to show me get me to sign up for their scheme, as a buyer or seller, after Bitpass. We went through a bunch of rigamarole to no benefit to ourselves or anyone. Nobody got squat out of their relationship with Bitpass that they couldn’t have exceeded in a tenth the time with a good old begging session. And Bitpass is hardly the start of it. There are probably people out there who still remember getting burned by Flooz. And Beenz. You say you’re different but when I look at your little charts or watch your videos you look exactly the same to me. The differences in the character of the core transaction are cosmetic. I have no faith in my participation doing your clients any good or adding any substance to my experience as a consumer. You are a solution that doesn’t work for a problem that doesn’t actually need to be solved.
I signed up for Tipjoy somewhat reluctantly, at the motivation of a friend, because I had been through definitive micropayment disappointment as a beta seller and buyer for the now several-years-dead Bitpass. I set up a musicians account on their Mperia store experiment. I bought anything I could remotely justify “owning” (as much as you own data). I bought micropayment cheerleader Scott McCloud’s pay per view webcomic experiment The Right Number and I’m still waiting for him to finish the story. I paid serial project-abandoner Patrick Farley for his Pokemon-Revelations mashup Apocamon - I don’t ever expect to see the end of that one. I bought music of dubious quality (though there were a couple of rough gems in the slag).
Bitpass left a particularly bad taste in my mouth because prior to closing up shop they quietly instituted account-hoovering fees - account inactivity fees, low balance fees - and I had to go raise hell to get them to give me back the money they had taken, which wasn’t much, less than twenty dollars, but which I felt obligated to demand on general principles. So at least Tipjoy got something right.
And now I see there are another couple going concerns out there, Kachingle and flattr (and I suppose there are more obscure contenders). My faith in these enterprises can be assessed by the fact that I won’t even go to the trouble of adding hyperlinks to their sites. You know how to use Google. I will note that Flattr comes from the mind of one of the founders of the Pirate Bay, which is so damn funny it deserves a post all its own, aside from the fact that it doesn’t really matter and will be defunct in just a few short years.
Let’s get into the history of micropayments as it stretches back to the mid 1990s. I’ll break down the evolution of these various strategies to collect small amounts of money from a large base of users and distribute them to content providers, and explain how these most recent start-ups have taken the lessons of the failures of their predecessors, and tapped into the robust and contentious discussions that have circled the internet, featuring heady concepts like the mental accounting barrier, and how their strategies differ from what has gone before.
Hah, yeah, right. Hey, maybe I’m wrong, and everyone will be Flattr’d and Kachingling this time next year and you can all come back and laugh and throw mocking quarters at the ubiquitous buttons I have been sheepishly compelled to add to all my projects. No. I know these people think they have figured out the core problems with micropayments, or “crowdfunding” or whatever they want to call it. They think they will change the game because they have eliminated paywalls and made everything voluntary and instituted the customer-selected price point and made it so easy to pay. Like all the foundered ships before them they have focused on the quality of the individual transaction of a consumer at a content site. These are deck chair on Titanic solutions, lipstick on pig solutions. Let’s take a look at the sow underneath. Here’s how it breaks down.
Number one problem: the content is not worth paying for. That’s the meanest way to put it but there it is. Bloggers, podcasters, webcomic artists, sub-indie label musicians set the price already at zero. There’s too much of it. Nobody is really asking to pay for it. The majority of people who think they should get paid for it can just put a donation button on their site. The tiny percentage of people who want to pay for the pleasure have already applied the button. Sites with sufficiently high value content and high volume traffic to make it worth the effort to formally “monetize” already do so with the methods that work, advertising and merchandising.
The transaction systems all break down on two points, neither of which are what ever get addressed by the fixes for a simple reason: they aren’t fixable by any small third-party intermediary. First, you have to sign up. Every day my resistance to sign-ups gets higher. Sign ups are something I have to maintain, I have to keep track of logins and passwords and update them if my email changes. They are potential weaknesses in the eternal battle to hold a line on my privacy and security. My online history is littered with pointless sign-ups I never used and which served no purpose, and every time I’m solicited to set up another one I ask, with increasing self-interest, what am I getting out of doing this? In this case I then go and take a look at their (always poorly framed, disorganized) content rosters. Which returns us to problem number one.
Second, if I do sign up, I have to maintain some sort of account. I have to transact real money into this thing so that I have something to spend (or pay off something I owe). Should I trust you to hold on to my credit card information? Is what you have to offer compelling enough to get me to sign up for a repeating transaction on some kind of subscription basis? Right now the enterprises that have earned this position are Apple (via iTunes and Apps), eMusic and Amazon. For random one-off small transactions PayPal already exists. Take a look at problem number one and guess what your chances are.
Next problem: the support transaction itself invites me to do something I have become incredibly proficient at avoiding. I have to notice a thing to click and then click it. If you’ve gotten all clever and made it some sort of optional pay-what-you-like scheme then I have to make a decision on top of that. At some point along the line I have to have signed up. On the internet I am ignoring this sort of thing all the live long day. Advertisement clicks, donation button clicks, partners and affiliate clicks, take a survey clicks. I find the content on the page and pay attention to that.
What it all adds up to is work and money for something I’m used to getting for free. Which brings us to the last but not least point: a significant percentage of your best potential customers and clients have been burned by the assholes who have gone before you. I honestly can’t think what anyone would have to show me get me to sign up for their scheme, as a buyer or seller, after Bitpass. We went through a bunch of rigamarole to no benefit to ourselves or anyone. Nobody got squat out of their relationship with Bitpass that they couldn’t have exceeded in a tenth the time with a good old begging session. And Bitpass is hardly the start of it. There are probably people out there who still remember getting burned by Flooz. And Beenz. You say you’re different but when I look at your little charts or watch your videos you look exactly the same to me. The differences in the character of the core transaction are cosmetic. I have no faith in my participation doing your clients any good or adding any substance to my experience as a consumer. You are a solution that doesn’t work for a problem that doesn’t actually need to be solved.
Sunday, February 07, 2010
The eternal evolution of Search
A website is down, and I wonder as usual if there is some weirdness between me and them (that sounds like I'm having juvenile relationship drama) or if the site is, in fact, down. Status issues for non-responding sites has been a bit of a search loophole, I've noticed - unless the site is big enough that its being down is literally news. Otherwise unless there is some sort of separate status site or else I happen to know of some blog or whatever that is liable to post about it, the issue of whether it is down or there is just some issue on my end I'm not getting can be tough to answer.
I noticed something new when I googled the site that was down this time though: among the search responses was a somewhat dynamic return of recent Twitter postings relevant to the subject, and sure enough the answer was there. It is an interesting bridge between honest-to-goodness "it'll be on teevee" level news and the continual, ephemeral froth which we call The Matrix. The site was indeed down. In the process of poking around this discovery I also found out about Down for everyone or just me? which takes all the drudgery out of it, but my point is, this is the sort of "duh, that's obvious" innovation that is why Google is still relevant. I couldn't help but notice that bing.com had not yet caught on to this one. Have those jokers captured any market share that they didn't pay top dollar for?
I noticed something new when I googled the site that was down this time though: among the search responses was a somewhat dynamic return of recent Twitter postings relevant to the subject, and sure enough the answer was there. It is an interesting bridge between honest-to-goodness "it'll be on teevee" level news and the continual, ephemeral froth which we call The Matrix. The site was indeed down. In the process of poking around this discovery I also found out about Down for everyone or just me? which takes all the drudgery out of it, but my point is, this is the sort of "duh, that's obvious" innovation that is why Google is still relevant. I couldn't help but notice that bing.com had not yet caught on to this one. Have those jokers captured any market share that they didn't pay top dollar for?
Friday, February 05, 2010
Doing it right
Honestly, I hate to keep going on about eMusic - and I think after this it should really be all I have to say about the situation, barring some extreme development (the slow accretion of major labels definitely not qualifying). But what the hell, I call these businesses out when they are horrible so I should be fair and point it out when they do it right.
I wasn't happy with the default subscription model eMusic had informed me I would be converted to when my current subscription (the last under the old pricing model) expired in March. I think I understand the basis for it; it appears they just chose the closest plan to my original price. Rather than wait and likely forget I decided to convert my plan now (the balance remaining on my old subscription was pro-rated).
Glory be: as an apparent token of appreciation for sticking with the company eMusic gave me one hundred extra credits as a subscription bonus. Dear Executives of eMusic: that shit is working for me. I gotta go get some music.
I wasn't happy with the default subscription model eMusic had informed me I would be converted to when my current subscription (the last under the old pricing model) expired in March. I think I understand the basis for it; it appears they just chose the closest plan to my original price. Rather than wait and likely forget I decided to convert my plan now (the balance remaining on my old subscription was pro-rated).
Glory be: as an apparent token of appreciation for sticking with the company eMusic gave me one hundred extra credits as a subscription bonus. Dear Executives of eMusic: that shit is working for me. I gotta go get some music.
Monday, February 01, 2010
Overload versus Filters
I'm not an unbridled Clay Shirkey partisan, but this small talk he produced in response to my recent essay on overload is not bad. Clay's always shaking the Phree Tree for content ideas.
Just kidding, this is like two years old.
Just kidding, this is like two years old.
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