Internet Ecomony

Fame vs Fortune:Micropayments and Free contents by Clay Shirky
Misunderstanding Micropayments by Sccot MacCloud

It is very interesting reading articles that have totally different points of view about same phenomenon. Shirky published an article, “Fame vs Fortune: Micropayments and Free contents” about the ecology publishing power on the internet and based on this, he supposed the failure of micropayments. Scott McCloud published an article named “Misunderstanding Micropayments” to respond Shirky’s article.

I have finished these two articles, and conceive myself as an Internet contents consumer. Have I ever paid for Internet contents? The answer is No. Sometimes I find some contents that I really need but if I should pay for these, I usually start looking for other contents. So I think about what makes me think like that seriously. There are two reasons that I have for not paying for Internet contents. First, I am always sure that there are other contents that I can get without paying on the internet. As Shirky says there is a huge world of free contents. Second, whenever I get information from the internet, I used to doubt weather it is reliable or not. Sometimes I could not find where the information comes from. Because in the internet world, anyone can post everything no matter whether is true or not. And when I face the contents that I have to pay, I could not check whole contents. I should decide if I would buy them or not just depending on a little preview. But paradoxically if I could check whole contents through the preview, I would not buy them because practically I already got the information that I needed. In my case this is a huge dilemma.

After reading I was aware of my actions are related with “mental transaction cost” that Shirky mentions in his article. Because of these two reasons, I can not feel internet contents are worth buying willingly even though these are very cheep. And also, my reasons are based on internet’s distinctions which are opening to anyone and being full of open sources speaking of free contents. These distinctions make the economic situations of the online different from the one of the real world. Because of these, I consider micopayments system was failed.

On the other hand, as a creator, of course I agree with McCloud’s argument that creators should be paid for their works. But still I am wondering that the same paying system with the real economic system could be the most effective way to be compensated for their work on the web. The internet world is one of the biggest possible markets to show our works and hopefully to get compensations for them. So I hope, even though online world is changing too fast and too big to control, internet market would be getting mature to a positive side.