Fame vs Fortune: Micropayments and Free Content
http://www.shirky.com/writings/fame_vs_fortune.html

Micropayments, small digital payments of between a quarter and a
fraction of a penny, made (yet another) appearance this summer with
Scott McCloud's online comic, The Right Number, accompanied by
predictions of a rosy future for micropayments. To read The Right
Number, you have to sign up for the BitPass micropayment system; once
you have an account, the comic itself costs 25 cents.
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BitPass will fail, as FirstVirtual, Cybercoin, Millicent, Digicash,
Internet Dollar, Pay2See, and many others have in the decade since
Digital Silk Road, the paper that helped launch interest in
micropayments. These systems didn't fail because of poor
implementation; they failed because the trend towards freely offered
content is an epochal change, to which micropayments are a pointless
response.
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The failure of BitPass is not terribly interesting in itself. What is
interesting is the way the failure of micropayments, both past and
future, illustrates the depth and importance of putting publishing
tools in the hands of individuals. In the face of a force this large,
user-pays schemes can't simply be restored through minor tinkering
with payment systems, because they don't address the cause of that
change -- a huge increase the power and reach of the individual.