Disqus - Latest Comments for marcglasberg

Re: Micropaymets 3.0? iCents

marcglasberg — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 15:23:05 -0000

@Xerexes:

I would also like to make clear to you what iCents.net does that isn't already out there in various apps and software bits.

iCents main goal is to reduce mental transaction costs (the "psychological effect"). iCents is supposed to work even when we are lazy with short attention spans. No other micropayment platform has even tried to do this before.

I could go into details, but you would probably sleep on me ;) So, instead, I will ask you to go through the demo pages below. They are fun and show how these websites could make money through micropayments. Then it will become very clear to you how iCents.net manages to not disrupt the user experience when paying.

- YouTube demo page: http://www.icents.net/demo/...
- The New York Times demo page: http://www.icents.net/demo/...
- Flickr demo page: http://www.icents.net/demo/...
- Creative Commons demo page: http://www.icents.net/demo/...
- Yahoo Answers demo page: http://www.icents.net/demo/...
- Facebook demo page: http://www.icents.net/demo/...

Note: you don't need to spend real money to go through the demo pages. Simply choose to sign in with PayPal, and then enter any fake email and password.

Cheers,
Marc.

Re: Micropaymets 3.0? iCents

marcglasberg — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 14:45:48 -0000

Hi. This is Marc, from iCents.net, and I would like to post my whole answer to Gordon:

-----------------------------------

Hi Gordon,

iCents is composed of two parts. The first part is creating paid-links (micropayments and/or micro-subscriptions), and you can already do it very easily by following the instructions on iCents website.

The second part is controlling access. The reason why you can access the URL directly is because there is no access control there yet.

We are finishing the development of the access control part, and in fact you will be able to do it in a number of ways. The easiest one, in my opinion, will be to install some software we'll provide, and then define your own naming convention. Our default (that you may change) is that all URLs that contain the term "-pay" should be controlled by the server. Then, the download URL could be renamed:

http://www.icents.net/en/de...
or
http://www.icents.net/en/de...

This will be enough to control access! As you can see, it is easy to protect a whole folder, or a single file, since the "-pay" can be anywhere within the URL.

As I said, this is just one of the ways of controlling access. You will be able to do it in many different ways, depending on the technology you prefer. So, I am afraid you will have to wait a little bit until we launch the access control, but I will for sure let you know about it as soon as we launch it.

If you have any other questions, please feel free to ask.

Cheers,

Marc Glasberg

Re: The New Case For Micropayments

marcglasberg — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 12:53:44 -0000

Michael:

Last things first.

Micropayments is a bad word, because it was never clearly defined. However, what most people mean when they say "micropayments" is 1 cent to 5 dollars, and usually from 20 cents to 1 dollar. This is the definition we use here, and this is the definition you will find mostly everywhere nowadays, including when people talk about iTunes. "Small payments" would be better, but almost nobody except Clay Shirky uses this term. So we're stuck with micropayments.

Also, people tend to use the term micropayments when users pay for a "unit" of content. For example, when you pay for a single newspaper article. I prefer the term micro-subscription when the price is below 5 dollars for a bigger package of content. For example, when you pay for a whole newspaper. If you want to see the difference, go to the YouTube micro-subscription demo. You'll see you can pay for individual videos (a micropayment of 20 cents for 1 day), or for all videos in YouTube (a micro-subscription of 1 dollar for 5 hours). Both are in the same price range; but when you pay for a single video you are taken to the video page right away, while the micro-subscription just "unlocks" all videos.

Now, to your point about the time-limited access being distasteful. I completely agree, but this is only true when time really limits what users want to do. If you park your car to go shopping and you have 1 hour to come back, this is limiting. But if you park your car and have 20 hours to come back it is not, because you know there is no chance you will need more than 20 hours in this case. The parking meter, of course, can't give you 20 hours because the streets contain limited parking spots, and the government wants other people to use them (Limiting your parking time is in fact the whole point of parking meters). But in the Internet it's no problem if websites give 20 hours of access for people that just need 1 hour, since users are not competing with each other for limited resources.

Let's consider the YouTube example again. If a video is 1 hour long and you give users 24 hours to watch it, this is much more than they need, so it does not become distasteful. In other words, you lower the mental transaction costs. It would become distasteful if you would give them only 2 hours, but it's up to YouTube not to make this mistake, right? This is a question of strategy, and it's even independent of the payment system itself.

Now, about the 4 steps you listed above.

For Step 1 I would just write "make users prefer your website, all things included". This can be achieved by providing users with free content they can't get anywhere, as you said (and this is hard to do), but it can also be achieved by making users want to be where other people are (Facebook and LinkedIn); or by providing unique interconnections with hardware users have (iTunes); or by making users addicted (gaming websites); or by providing the biggest possible audience to your work (YouTube); or by making users invest their time to build something inside your infrastructure so that their investment builds up (Evernote, Flickr, Zoho and Basecamp. Note that the Disqus engine we use for these comments falls under this category as well).

Step 2 is my only real small contribution to the current discussion about selling content. I'm just drawing attention to the fact that if your premium content is independent from your free content, people can use something similar to your premium content elsewhere and still continue to use your free content. I've seen websites that try the Freemium business model without making sure the premium content makes what they get for free even more useful, and they have failed miserably. I guess this is the real problem with paid news. It is easy to establish a Freemium model for news, but premium news are usually independent from the free news. It just doesn't work.

Step 3 would be more "let users pay without disrupting their user experience". This includes being easy, but it also includes considerations like not making time-limited access distasteful, (as you pointed out), letting users pay with the regular payment systems they already use, and much more. The whole point here is reducing the mental transaction costs (the psychological factor) and this is what we've been trying to achieve with the iCents.net payment platform and the micro-subscriptions concept.

The notion of a "Virtual Perimeter" is jargon, of course. It is Step 1 + Step 2.

Step 1 alone almost equals Freemium, but Step 1 + Step 2 is more than Freemium itself. I could call it super-Freemium. A Virtual Perimeter is a Freemium plus a strategy that hacks the Internet efficiencies of scale and distribution so that you can get people hooked. So, yes, maybe it is too liberal a word, but we are not forcing users to do anything, and it is not a monopoly as well. Maybe I could call it a "monopoly within the Freemium environment", close to what Clay Shirky did.