3 ms·

Of course the bitpass website is dead, as are micropayments. Now we have all you can eat subscriptions. I think the fundamental issue is there's too much stuff

• sdenton4 10y ago
  Bandwidth costs are highly dependent on where you live and what you can pay for. In most of the developing world, people access internet through their phones primarily, on prepaid plans costing about $5 per gigabyte, which can be a significant part of a monthly income.
  • sleepyhead 10y ago
    Where? In Cambodia 1.4gb costs $1.50. That's the cheapest I encountered but other developing countries in South East Asia isn't that much more expensive. Even Myanmar which has been on lockdown for decades and only recently got public sim cards is affordable for data. http://www.cellcard.com.kh/en/prepaid-plans/xg/ http://www.cellcard.com.kh/en/prepaid-plans/xg/
    • sdenton4 10y ago
      Kenya, for example, has 500Ksh for a GB, which comes to about $4.92, USD; this is comparable to rates I encountered elsewhere in SSA. Meanwhile, the less money you have, the more you pay! Smaller bundles cost more per GB, and many of the Kenyans I knew would regularly buy 150MB top-ups due to lack of upfront funds. On AirTel in India, it looks like they charge about $3.88 for a 1GB bundle good for 28 days (there's a cheaper 1GB bundle good for 1 day, however, and some other deals available). There are also a few articles floating around on the _increasing_ cost of data in India, suggesting that companies started with cheaper data while establishing themselves in the marketplace, and over time have been more obliged to turn a profit instead of burning investor money on subsidized plans. Cambodia does look pretty cheap, though, I agree.
• thoughtsimple 10y ago
  The other side of too much stuff is that if micropayments start being widely used, you won't be able to keep up with the costs. We can see this with the App store where people complain bitterly about $0.99 or $1.99 prices.
• ghaff 10y ago
  Competition with free (from a direct monetary perspective) is certainly a problem with charging upfront for many types of content generally. However, that's not a problem that's especially unique to micropayments. It's been a while since I've read it but Shirky's original piece most focused on the mental transaction costs with deciding to pay a nickel (or whatever) to read an article. Assuming you accept that argument--which I'm largely inclined to--nothing has really changed. The arguments against micropayments have never been primarily about technology. Sure, you need a way to make low-cost transactions very low friction and very low cost overhead but that's the easy part. Subscriptions seem to be the way paid content access has mostly headed. The problem with making subscriptions more broadly apply to online text content is that you need to get a critical mass for a platform and you need to deal in some way with the standard issues of paywalls.
• xorcist 10y ago
  Micropayments dead? In-game purchasing alone has yearly revenue of how many billion dollars? It just doesn't look like people thought in the 90s.
  • tdkl 10y ago
    On the web, not in Store walled silos.