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Just got my first “Networks, Economics, and Culture” list
mailing, an essay from Clay Shirky, and
it’s a hum-dinger for someone who watches the online content space
(specifically comics) as I do.

In Fame vs Fortune:
Micropayments and Free Content, Shirky decries micropayment systems:

Like the salami slicing exploit in computer
crime, micropayment believers imagine that such tiny amounts of money
can be extracted from the user that they will not notice, while the
overall volume will cause these payments to add up to something
significant for the recipient. But of course the users do notice,
because they are being asked to buy something. Mental transaction costs
create a minimum level of inconvenience that cannot be removed simply by
lowering the dollar cost of goods.

He goes on to conclude that
empowering creators to distribute directly to consumers “does not
make them publishers;” rather, it merely offers the (admittedly
quite revolutionary) ability for creators to reach a large audience for
free. (Now you understand the “vs” in the essay’s title.)

It’s a pretty solid essay, but I have a gripe with one of the premises:

Analog publishing generates per-unit costs — each book or magazine requires a
certain amount of paper and ink, and creates storage and transportation costs.
Digital publishing doesn’t. Once you have a computer and internet access, you
can post one weblog entry or one hundred, for ten readers or ten thousand,
without paying anything per post or per reader. In fact, dividing up front
costs by the number of readers means that content gets cheaper as it gets more
popular, the opposite of analog regimes.

Almost, but not entirely, true. Just ask the proprietors of a highly-popular
website (e.g. the Penny-Arcade guys, or Tom Tomorrow, or anyone who’s
ever
been linked from slashdot) about that first
Over Allotted Bandwidth notice. If you’re footing your own hosting costs (as
many of these sites are), that hosting bill will kill you. The cost in
providing free content is not limited to the fixed expense of the creator’s
time and effort — the expense of providing the content varies with the
audience size, and is decidedly nonzero.