$5

I read an article about creating content online the other day, making the point that it's not sustainable and leads to a frustrating compromise: do you create content for free and give up being able to rely on it as your main work, or do you make people pay for it and drastically reduce your audience? One answer that tends to appear in these discussions is micropayments, the idea that each pageview or click or like or something costs a tiny fee.

A lot of time and effort has gone into trying to make general-purpose micropayments work. I don't even mean just the financial backend, though even today Bitcoin is the current frontrunner and still doesn't support them. More importantly, nobody seems to have made the actual product very compelling. Probably the best example we have of effective micropayments is free-to-play games where you pay some (non-micro) amount into a virtual wallet that you then spend (sort of) micro amounts from. Various people have tried to implement that on a wide scale or with micro-er payments, and as far as I can tell it hasn't really taken off anywhere outside of games.

The fundamental issue, it seems to me, is that people just don't think in micro amounts of money. I've heard the micropayment compensation idea dozens of times: each page you view costs a microcent and over the course of the day you've only spent a dollar or two, but that adds up to serious money for the people making the content. I can't see any technological reason it wouldn't work, especially if you followed the wallet formula as set out by game companies. But it just doesn't seem like something people want that much.

Who wants to give someone a fraction of a cent? One of the best things about rewarding a creator is that it feels good, and those miniscule amounts don't feel like anything. What's worse, it completely severs the connection between spending and outcome. It's not even "I paid this person a microcent", it's "my actions set in motion a process that eventually resulted in this person having some of my microcents". Which is doubly unsatisfying: you don't enjoy giving as much, and later on when the total bill is due you probably don't even remember what it was for.

So I'd like to suggest that the real problem isn't making micropayments work, it's making macropayments work. Instead of every piece of content costing a miniscule amount, I'd be happier paying the really good ones a larger amount, say, $5. It would work as follows: you see some content you think is really good. You press the $5 button. The person who made the content gets $5 from you. That's the whole thing.

Right now I think the main thing holding back a macropayments system like that is just that nobody has built it yet. Donate buttons give you too much choice and aren't specific about what you're paying for. Paying people through PayPal or other payment processors takes a lot of clicks. This should be a simple click (or a hold-to-confirm) with an immediate connection between action and result.

You thought it was worth $5, you gave it $5. Simplicity itself!