No one's yet made a workable solution for web micropayments, but one aspirational design metaphor I like is an electricity meter.
I don't think about running my dishwasher as a transaction with a price and a receipt: I just do things, and I get a bill at the end of the month.
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Prices are (fortunately!) calibrated so that the monthly bill is not usually a big deal. If it seems high, I might dig in: hey, this appliance is wasteful! Or maybe I need to turn off the mining bots or whatever. But default-batched transactions really lowers friction.
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It's interesting to think about monetizing web content along these lines: you just read things; small charges accumulate; you pay the bill at the end of the month and maybe change future behavior if it seems too high. You could set a cap if you wanted. Aim for effortlessness.
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I was excited to discover today that there's a proposed web standard very much along these lines! webmonetization.org
I don't know if this is the right solution, but *something* like this might help us escape the awful ads model.
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Running the web content/experiences like a utility has been the vision of many since the early days, however the same way that the other side of the transaction where production and pricing happens need the aggregate event to determine fair and predictable pricing overall.
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Right, I noticed that the web monetization spec punts the choice of rates to clients! Odd…
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That's why it won't work for the long tail and fringes, and only for mass media. And only in the short term because they get their pricing from a different ecosystem and bring it to this one.
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It's an information theory question: the price signal comes from both positive and negative economic choice. Either negotiation in the bazar for the fringes, or supply demand in the bigger market. The utility model doesn't have that.
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