Micropayments Revisited

Some of you may recall the disagreements we had with Scott McCloud back when he posted some comics on his website touting the virtues of the non-existent business model. Now, however, he claims to have found a micropayments solution that will allow him to charge 25 cents for each of three installments of "The Right Number", a "spooky, psychological drama about math, sex, obsession and phone numbers". I wish him all the luck in the world, and I hope he has found the right solution to his ongoing search. Unfortunately, I suspect that the following will happen:

• McCloud will get tons of publicity for his brave new experiment.
• Lots and lots of people following the hype will try out the new micropayments system out of sheer curiosity.
• The comic will get thousands of readers, and McCloud will declare his experiment a wild success.
• The number of readers will drop off drastically after a few days. Subsequent uses of the micropayments system by McCloud and others will be extremely disappointing as they fail to get the same publicity as the first experiment, and as readers discover that it's not worth their time do tinker with a complex payment system for 25 cents worth of material.

Now, like I said, I hope I'm wrong. I hope McCloud has found the Holy Grail, 'cause it will be great for all of us. I simply hope that his unbridled enthusiasm for an unproven solution does not cause him to overstate the results of his experiment. McCloud has a resposibility to his public to share all the data he collects, encouraging and otherwise, from the first day and from far down the road. We need to know the whole story of how this pans out before we can declare it A Good Thing, and that means being patient and knowing how to properly interpret the results.