First up is Clay Shirky:
Followed closely by responses from Joey Manley:Clay Shirky wrote:BitPass will fail, as FirstVirtual, Cybercoin, Millicent, Digicash, Internet Dollar, Pay2See, and many others have in the decade since Digital Silk Road, the paper that helped launch interest in micropayments. These systems didn't fail because of poor implementation; they failed because the trend towards freely offered content is an epochal change, to which micropayments are a pointless response.
And Scott McCloud:Joey Manley wrote:It's true that there will always be fantastic free content on the web -- just as there is fantastic free content on television. But, just as with television, the advertising model on the web rewards lowest-common-denominator material, which can attract enormous audiences. .... The fantastic free content that isn't lowest- common-denominator, or at least designed-to-appeal-to-the-masses (which isn't always the same thing, but usually is) is destined to wallow in anonymity, for the most part, and relying on the unforced generosity of readers for donations will never be a business model that can generate reliable and regular cash flow.
It shouldn't be hard for anyone to guess that I'm with Manley and McCloud on this one. It's just plain foolish to say that something will never work simply because it hasn't successfully been done yet. With that kind of attitude, Man would never have invented the airplane, much less walked on the moon. Feh to that. More importantly, Shirky ignores some of the realities to the situation, which is mentioned in the responses linked to above, with regard to both the cost of providing the content (Shirky claims it's so close to free to do so that offering it to audiences at no charge is always the best way to go. He's wrong, since bandwidth always costs) and the desire to make money from producing your content (if I had worked out how to make a living by drawing my comics, then I probably would have updated the site since January (Cripes! Has it been so long?)).Scott McCloud wrote:Shirky?s "epochal change" is real enough. Free content is here to stay, file-sharing is here to stay, and any attempt to completely wipe out either is doomed to failure (as it should be). But that in no way precludes the co-existence of markets based on the desires of willing sellers and willing buyers. To proclaim without a hint of doubt that such a market will never exist for low cost digital content contradicts everything we know about the Web?s inexhaustible capacity for variety and adaptation.
There will always be doomsayers, won't there?