Scott's micropayment ideas a reality

Micropayments, Macropayments, Subscriptions, etc.

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vtm

Scott's micropayment ideas a reality

Post by vtm »

Scott McCloud's proposal nearly a year ago about selling comics for micropayments has been a reality for quite some time. http://www.vtechmedia.com/home/webcomics.asp is just such a marketplace for comics that works almost exactly as he describes it. In here, artists can upload, list and sell their artwork at no upfront charge to them at prices as low as a dime or a quarter. The system keeps track of all the accounting, billing, credit card authorization, etc. and pays out royalties. Only when a reader buys something does the cost for hosting, bandwidth, etc. get covered. Thus, the technical expenses get spread out across the entire system so no single individual has to foot the bill for the whole website. It's a system that makes a lot of sense. As the Internet changes from free-to-fee, systems such as these will keep springing up.
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This is not micropayments, and is not a solution

Post by lylebclarke »

Suggesting that this system is similar to what Scott envisioned is stretching the truth.

Vtech offers a database where you can upload your comics. Vtech then charge customers for downloading your comics and give you some of the money. Everything happens at their website. The interface is not designed for reading, viewing or promoting comics. There is no way to post a series, there is no way to smoothly go from one comic to the next, there is no way to integrate their payment system into your current site.

Lyle
vtm

Re: This is not micropayments, and is not a solution

Post by vtm »

lylebclarke wrote:Suggesting that this system is similar to what Scott envisioned is stretching the truth.

Vtech offers a database where you can upload your comics. Vtech then charge customers for downloading your comics and give you some of the money. Everything happens at their website. The interface is not designed for reading, viewing or promoting comics. There is no way to post a series, there is no way to smoothly go from one comic to the next, there is no way to integrate their payment system into your current site.

Lyle
Admittedly, I'll agree with you that it isn't entirely Scott's vision, but to give it some credit, many of the high-level concepts are the same: being able to sell content for sub-dollar amounts as low as a dime (by most people's definition counts as "micropayments"), authors never give up any rights of authorship (it's just a service), like Napster (as you point out and as Scott mentions as a possible application of micropayments), it is a centalized system, but instead of all things being traded free, it is possible to sell content using this system, and most important, vtechmedia's system is free to use because it pays for itself. Almost all other micropayment solutions require that you pay them something like $30/month just to integrate the payment system into your web site. On vtechmedia, it's free to submit and list content to the common pool, but if you don't like that, you can apply to start your own pool separate from everyone else's.

I don't disagree with you when you say the system isn't designed specifically for comics because it's the truth. It was designed to be a general purpose solution applicable to many different content markets. But to imply that it is "not micropayments and not a solution" is a bit of an unbalanced review I feel.
vtm

New comic posted

Post by vtm »

A new comic by D. Colvin has been posted to http://www.vtechmedia.com/home/webcomics.asp
B&W pages with detailed artwork some for a dime per download, others free.
The experiment in micropayments continues!
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Micropayment for Web content

Post by websafe »

About a year since the start of this thread, but all the links still work! Greg, thanks for posting about Scott McCloud's new comic with the BitPass micropayment feature. I put myself on their e-mail list as a potential future "earner."

I was impressed by John2two's table of the various micropayment options. I didn't know there were so many. Would love to hear reviews from people who've used any of these successfully.

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xerexes

Post by xerexes »

Great thread - I wanted to point out Kelly J wrote an article on micropayments over at Comixpedia which was posted today.
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