Les Jones

E-commerce > Scott McCloud Responds to Clay Shirky

Scott McCloud's Mis-Understanding Micropayments is a rebuttal to Clay Shirky's recent essay (see here and here). McCloud's main point is that the web sites that will benefit from micropayments are the ones that create unique content that can't be commodified:

Throughout this article, Shirky is talking almost exclusively about writers of news and criticism like himself. Ironically, these are the very sorts of content most likely to remain free and most likely to be treated as a commodity ("This site has movie listings for 20¢ a month and this site has movie listings for free; which one should I pick?"); and yes, of course, blogging, the ultimate vanity press, isn't switching to pay-per-view any time soon.

By ignoring music, movies, comics, radio shows, novels, software and games - the vast categories of content that are rarely interchangeable - Shirky is stacking the deck. This might have been just a forgivable oversight, but let's not forget that he's using these examples to publicly condemn a company with no such biases. Art is not a commodity and Shirky should know that.

Think about it: If you wanted Hail to the Thief and the whole album could be downloaded for $5.99, what difference does it make that there's a free album from Hootie and the Blowfish somewhere else? If you want to download Donnie Darko, who cares if someone else is giving away Dances with Wolves? If you want old Firesign Theatre recordings, why would the existence of a free Henny Youngman collection influence your decision? Comparing these decisions to "Coke versus Pepsi" denigrates the creative process.

The terms of the micropayment debate hinge on a definition: how big does a payment have to be to stop being a micropayment? If it's a dollar, then Apple's iTunes is an example of a micropayment success, because you can buy a song there for 99 cents. (Of course, Apple expects most customers to buy more than one song a month, and most customers have.) If the upper bound is a few cents, then there hasn't been a successful micropayment system yet, and it remains to be seen if the BitPass system McCould using will be the first.