God, hes left as on aur oun.
The right number.
Kelly Cooper has a good overview on Comixpedia about micropayments—what they are, how they work in theory, and why they’re back in the news again. Specifically, Scott McCloud is using his new comic The Right Number to help BitPass beta their micropayment system, which on the face of it seems simple and nifty. (Time will tell if it’s robust and trustworthy.) —Todd Allen’s take, on the other hand, is somewhat more pessimistic. He provides numbers to back up his claims, but his math is skewed: he’s comparing the publisher’s take of the cover price of a comic book to the take on a micropayment after the third party has skimmed its cut as if these were comparable incomes—totally ignoring publishing expenses such as paper, ink, presses, binding, staff, and the profit taken before a payment is made to the creator; expenses largely rendered irrelevant by a micropayment system over the web. Which is what makes micropayments theoretically attractive in the first place. (As far as practically attractive goes, well, that’s what betas are for. And launches. And the like. In other words, it remains to be seen.)
So go, get up to speed; you might want to keep an eye on this.
[Edited to correct bone-headed misreading of Todd Allen’s piece. Apologies to all concerned.]
Commenting is closed for this article.
Funny, I read the Allen piece and what I read was comparing cover prices _after_ the distributor discount, and then another section comparing micro-payments to the creative team's piece of the pie. Seems to me the real question is how many people will pay for the stuff.
Um, that's because my brain temporarily left the building when I was composing that sentence? --It doesn't much matter: his figures (and really, his math is fine; it's the numbers he's working with that are skewey) still don't take into account the cut the publisher has to spend on paper, ink, presses, binding, staff, and the profit that's taken before a payment is made to the creator--most of which are expenses that do not exist on the web.
Scott put it better. Very few publishers are going to use micropayments on the web; it's going to be the creators themselves. It makes much more sense to compare the cut a creator is paid per book with the micropayment after the third party takes its cut. That's a much more direct comparison, and is much more fair to how the transaction is envisioned.