http://www.goats.com/I'm sad that Bitpass was unable to make micropayments work. Despite my opinions regarding the feasibility of micropayments (and the lack thereof) and my gut feeling that this was a solution that had a lot of support from internet content creators but almost none from internet content consumers, I wanted Bitpass to succeed.
I'd be crazy to pass up a revenue stream that actually worked. If I thought I could get a penny a page from you people without impacting the size of my readerbase, I'd jump on it.
But Bitpass was hugely flawed, and I think we solidly demonstrated that here on this site. Even the critics of our experiment were eventually silenced. And no one since has produced any evidence that any webcomics creator was able to use Bitpass to create a sizable revenue stream (aside from Scott McCloud, whose audience consists in large part of folks who are interested in webcomics innovation).
Business is hard, folks. Starting a business is hard, creating and nurturing revenue streams is hard, creating working business models is near impossible. It takes more than just a wish and a blog post to create a new way of making money.
The first rule of creating a successful business is to give people what they want. Find a demand that is going unmet, and meet it. Or, alternatively, find a need that is being met and find a better way to meet it. Simply put, Bitpass failed to give end-users what they wanted, while free content has done exactly that. Free content beats paid content like paper beats rock.
Will someone eventually figure out how to make micropayments work? Maybe. But the hurdles are substantial, and cartoonists are not going to be the ones to jump them (unless there are some amazing economist/cartoonist hybrids out there that I am unaware of).
If you want to make money with your comics on the internet, don't look to the bright, shiny future. Don't aim high. Don't put your faith in imagination and technology and progress.
Instead, look at what works in the real world. Get your hands dirty a bit. Learn what you can from successful businesses. Take the good bits, shine them up, improve on them and make them work for you.
Rest in peace, Bitpass. You were too good for this world.
