Why micropayments won’t work

If you could sell a joke a day for a cent a day to enough people on the Internet then you’d be a billionaire. So ran the reasoning in the early days of the Net. The only problem was that there was no way of collecting the cent — the ‘micropayment’. But that would surely come, one day. I have to confess that I believed that too, in my time.

But now comes a terrific essay by Clay Shirky, one of the most thoughtful commentators on the Net, arguing that the cent-a-day scenario is untenable, and explaining why. He’s right and I was wrong.