| I think crowdfunding is an excellent idea but it's too early to see how it plays out. It could fail; it could be The New Thing. Too early to tell. One idea I've had, which I think has major steam, is passive payment. Given that my consulting rate is high (full rate I don't disclose but it's well over $200/h; however, I give lower rates, sometimes zero, for businesses I believe in and non-profits) it really isn't a major cost to pay $2/hour for websurfing. That's a rounding error. I have no problem paying $0.25 for the time it took to write this post because the value of the time itself is an order of magnitude greater. People would need to have the ability to calibrate their passive payment, obviously. For me, $2/hour is nothing; for the developed world, it's far too much. Right now, advertising is the only passive payment system we have and it's extraordinarily inefficient. Passive payment would make living by blogging much easier. For example, I get about 1700 hits per day (2.5 minutes each) on my blog. If we assume the average web user sets his passive payment level to $1.00 per hour (median would be lower; mean might be around that) then I'd be making $70 per day. Not enough to live on (in New York) but it would almost cover my too-damn-high rent. Passive payment would also be great for time-tracking. I probably wouldn't waste as much time if I realized "holy shit, I wasted $0.73 reading that garbage!" Finally, it would obsolete those damn paywalls. I don't mind paying 95 cents to read a good NYT article (again, the time is much a greater expense) but bringing out my credit card is a hassle. |