Micropayment Ecommerce Is Finally Here

Monday, February 28, 2005

I just gladly donated $30 to Jason Kottke's bid to make his website a full-time job.

I love this to a nearly unexplainable degree, this ecommerce for the new generation:

  1. Single publisher, no support or tech or sales or design staff. He's like the Knight Ryder, without that crusty old guy.
  2. He's working on making a personal site a professional one that pays the bills entirely.
  3. He's not selling a physical product like other similar sites that have made a go at self-sustaining small web businesses (Scott Andrew's songs or Clip-N-Seal's useful invention). He's just selling his thoughts, himself if you will, his take on technology, the world, politics, whatever.
  4. He's also looking to be member-supported, like a NPR for the 21st century. He's not plastering the site with advertisements like other blogging/informational small companies that tax your patience for the benefit of a corporate dollar (like Engadget - Jesus, what's with the annoying animated Flash ads? I thought that was supposed to be for clueless newspaper sites only). Instead, his site is a ruthless meritocracy - it'll live and die by what the visitors find valuable. As I heard Tom Petty explain at a concert once as to why he didn't accept corporate sponsorship, which was followed by the roaring applause of the entire stadium: “This concert was brought to you by you!”

Very, very cool.

There's another site that has been doing pretty well from this member subscription-supported business model and that's the Mac news-oriented Daring Fireball, which I also visit regularly and has a great fan base. Jason's venture looks to be even more interesting, as his topic is inherently less of a niche market.

Is this the future? Who knows but probably not all of it, just one aspect of many to come. Not many of us have the audience that Jason does, even though his audience isn't as much of an accident as it might look: his writing and thinking has been leading-edge, relevant and most of all, constant for years now. It's like the Morgan Freeman quote I love from yesterday's Oscars, where someone asked him if he was surprised he won and he replied:

I started out at the age of about 15 to be a movie actor . . . I was always trying to be a movie actor . . . this isn’t serendipity in terms of me being here. This is the fight I’ve been fighting all my life.

Jakob Nielsen (we all love him unconditionally, right?) got me thinking about the micropayment thing years ago and it looked for a long time like it would be one of his futurism theories that would take hold decades later than originally intended, if at all. Even though this business model still isn't exactly what he described, there's enough similarities (advertising doesn't work on the web, locked in rates of subscription are wrong too, lots of people paying small amounts adds up to big money) to be the closest thing out there to what he invisioned and I'm glad to see that I was wrong about any form of this kind of commerce thriving so soon.

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