scr Paying for It

[Simon Wistow <simon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Irony of ironies, in an Alanis Morrisette kind of way.

whilst reading this cartoon ...
  
http://www.penny-arcade.com/view2002-04-29rl.html

I was paying some money to the Penny Arcade fund. Cos I like them and it
was cheap.

Recently there was a thread on Plastic about the fact that Salon had
36,000 premium subscribers paying 36 dollars each ...

http://www.salon.com/letters/editor/2002/04/25/premium_anniversary/index.html

... but that they were still doomed ...

http://www.plastic.com/article.html?sid=02/04/27/00295619

Now 36 dollars isn't much but I read (counts) 45, christ, sites
regularly although I probably 'only' read between 15 and 20
daily.  That's 720 dollars, about 500 quid. Twice that if I subscribe to
all of them. Now I could probably afford that and I get an awful lot of
info for that money but it's still a lot. Plus, I can see anothe
rproblem with it - if I can't see the content for free then how do I
search for stuff. How do I share interesting articles with friends?

Micropayments are even worse ... if there were micropayments you'd be
loathe to surf around, skip through random sites, follow links from your
friends. If it was quick and easy to set up then every 2 bit web site
would charge you just like personal homepages started getting banners in
97.

There was an idea a while back that ISPs would charge more and then give
a percentage of that money to the RIAA and the MPAA to compensate them
for pirated music and films. A system for recompensing servers for
content *might* theoretically be workable but would require soem seriosu
thought and security. 

Thoughts? Ideas? Answers on a postcard to the usual address.

More Plastic on this ...
http://www.plastic.com/article.html?sid=02/04/29/20562606

-- 
: omnipotence for dummies