… linky?

I am a poor student. I have no credit card. How the hell can I, or any of the other hundreds of thousands of students who read webcomics, pay for micropayments? When I have a job next year, I will buy merchandise… clearly I will be rewarding the webcomic artists who have invested in my entertainment over the years, and not those who locked up their content in an unusable, unfriendly elitist format.

Yes, that’s right. Micropayments are ELITIST. They alienate the very people who are the core of readership.

And if you’re only catering to this tiny core of rich bitches with credit cards then how in the hell do you get your comic to get that critical mass necessary for your comic to be successful?

Micropayments are a joke.

Actually, that whole introverted/extroverted dichotomy is a bit bollocks too. For one thing, he’s quite incorrectly identified some comics on the spectrum. For another, you only have to see the success of Charlie Brown to see it’s all about marketing niches, not about introversion and extroversion.

I think “introverted” comics probably would (at a guess) make their money best from selling book collections of their comics and other nice limited edition sorts of things. If there is a market/readership… people will buy stuff as long as it appeals to them, surely?

Give the t-shirts away for free, and then charge for the comic! People will pay it if they want to get the joke.

But I don’t mean to front for McCloud or Zabel, saying “don’t worry, we’ll make it work alright”, because I’m not convinced that micropayments are the best or the only technology to support webcomics. I recognize that many artists may have legitimate needs for income aside from the costs of their web servers. However I also note many artists who wouldn’t put out tip jars and the like if the cost of their popularity hadn’t forced their hand. I feel as well that people ought not to be compelled to create a business if a business isn’t what they had in mind.

I personally see the fault in HTTP and, more deeply, the ‘dumb middle’ assumptions of Internet protocols. There exist valuable advantages of scaling & abstraction for the dumb middle, the principle that the smarts of an protocol are put into the ends of any conversation rather than in the medium inbetween. Living with this strategy helps if both ends are ’smart enough’ to carry their conversations. In the good ol’ days, if you were online you were a member of an institution or company with smart resources to spare, and amateur initiatives would subsist on their leftovers.

I’d like to see us develop a distributed file system in place of HTTP. Rather than the smarts of rented web servers, this technology would use the P2P smarts of the many computers sharing this new file system.

I’m pretty sure Joyce and Walky runs on micropayments. I paid a small amount of money and got some comics. It worked out to about US25c a comic.

I fully agree that wishing that micropayments will just come along and solve everything will not make micropayments come along and solve everything, but on the other hand something very like micropayments is already being done. No moratorium is necessary because the debate is probably over by now, and the only people left are the people who only want micropayments this way, with some seperate provider and automated systems and all that shit which won’t ever come about until Paypal stops working for people. To my mind, there’s only about three or so of those people left.

I’m Merus, and I’ve made micropayments.

Well, there are thousands of webcomics out there these days, most of them available for free. With so much free content already present, it will make it a lot harder for any payment system to win any ground in the fray.

I certainly agree that micropayments don’t need to be looked down upon without reason; I just think that there are legitimate reasons to be doubtful of it.

Hell, I’m an engineer at heart — approximation is what we do. While undoubtedly you and I could draw three beer-mats worth of scribbles and understand each other perfectly, the translation of nerd into the vernacular is space-consuming (thus, hundreds of pages of abandoned thesis, where the engineer had to be translated for the historians, and the historian for the engineers, none of which should be inflicted on the readers of these silly little essays).

My apologies if you think I oversimplified anything to the point of misrepresentation. And tell BobsBancCorp of South Dakota that they’re a bunch of usurious bastards.