No such thing as free lunch

Update 20030916: Alphaque's Thots on Micropayment

It has been quite some time since i wrote about tech stuff. Well, it's about time. There's more to Digital Fugue than just... cigars and lyrics :) Right now I'm at the office juggling between completing a tender, blog hopping and some tech update (hence this post)... Need a little getting used to but, i can manage it... i hope... Anyway, here's a little tech scoop.

When the internet boom started in the mid 90s, everybody expect everything online to be free. Looking at the consumer point of view, they have already paid access and not to mention phone bills (at that time, broadband is fairly unheard of), why should they pay for content right? Make sense? No.

There's more to just pay once and get all. You have to look at the bigger picture, look at the internet value chain. Each segment had its own value and someone have to be responsible for that. And someone need to be paid for providing the value to each segment. For example we go back to the example above, the infra provider will get the so called dial-up charges. The Service provider gets the access charges and perhaps the bandwidth charges which falls under access in the chain. Application provider get their fair share, followed by content providers. Finally the customer gets what he paid for.

Which brings me to this article from Technology Review. According to Henry Jenkins, in his article Selling Online Content, 25 cents at a time, micropayments is getting popular among the masses. People would prefer paying a dime and a quater every now and then as oppose to paying lump sum for a particular time span.

In the future, i believe, we will be buying online news, like we would buy newspaper today. Afterall, CNN have already started charging for premium content. Then comes pay per view models. Perhaps we could buy news that we want to see. Sports freak would buy sports sections only, business people buy the business section only etc. Of course then the news providers will have to lure readers to buy their exclusive content. Free news will still be available but limited in content, maybe just a headline and summary.. Perhaps a huge picture of Anna Kournikova sweating like a pig would entice some of their audience?

Malaysia could make use of a head start, in its MyKad. And the recent annoucement on Malaysia's RFID chip, I couldn't agree more with Alphaque on this issue. The thought of working MyKad, the Malaysian Passport and even the Touch 'n Go card and the RFID chippy together would create lot of synergies and the possibilities are endless.

Speaking about lunch, I gotta go out and get a bite.

Comments

[graceshu]

Hey, that thing abt the Internet value chain is interesting - never really thought of it that way before. Is there a model anywhere that I could refer to?

[KaZ]

You do a google on Internet value chain...
I have a few literature with me, hiding somewhere in the office cabinet. .. unfortunately, no soft copy...