Les Jones

E-commerce > Lore Sjöberg on Micropayments

Regarding Clay Shirky's essay, Fame vs. Fortune: Micropayments and Free Content, Lore at Slumbering Lungfish weighs in with his opinion:

But here's the dirty little secret of the artistic Web community: We're not as popular as we like to think we are. It's fun to look at your access logs and count your visitors and compare yourself favorably to the paid circulation of The Economist. It's especially nice if you want to rail loudly at the injustice of The Economist making approximately four plabillion percent more revenue than you. But that's like playing your guitar at the corner of Telegraph and Bancroft and counting the entire population of Berkeley as your fan base.

Shirky argued that most content will stay free because artists want fame more than they want fortune. I'd take it a step further. The Web-wide reticence among independent artists to actually hunker down and charge for material is because we know that if we did so, we wouldn't get fame or fortune. We'd get, at best, beer money and a clique.