4 ms·
The problem is that a payment system for hundreds of extremely tiny pieces does not work. See my car example. You have to make a decision "do I pay those people
by Noseshine 10y ago
The problem is that a payment system for hundreds of extremely tiny pieces does not work. See my car example. You have to make a decision "do I pay those people" on a level that is too small.
Similar reason why companies like Netflix exist. Imagine each movie would try to sell itself, they would get their own webshop, one per movie... and similar to why subscriptions exist and many other bundling arrangements. Making payment decisions comes at a psychological cost, but just because it's "psychological" and your brain doesn't pay some other part of itself with coin or credit card doesn't mean it's not a cost economics cares about. Cost in economics is not just money.
Another example is Twitch. In addition to giving mostly gamers (but they also have programmers streaming and other non-gaming activities) a technical platform to stream content from home they also give them a monetization opportunity. While you can subscribe to streams individually, which is of course not what I suggested, they now have a program where you can subscribe to a handful of channels for free if you have an Amazon Prime subscription (http://www.theverge.com/2016/9/30/13125824/twitch-prime-amazon-ad-free-game-discounts http://www.theverge.com/2016/9/30/13125824/twitch-prime-amaz...). So this is a partial example of this "bundling" of small individual items to increase the overall spending of money compared to having to make individual purchases.
I see this as an opportunity for achieving something similar for people who contribute code, there could be a business opportunity to bundle a large number of those offerings and in turn offer the programmers a way to monetization, to get paid out of the subscription pool. It's much more difficult though because the audience on bot sides, those offering as well as those buying, is much more discriminating, and the situation already is far more fragmented. For things like gaming streams it never was (very fragmented) to begin with. Imagine Github had a subscription and would pay out to projects according to use (stared, downloads, whatever).