A penny for your thoughts …
p2pnet news view Freedom | P2P:- In my post, yesterday, on the The Pirate Bay saga, which is rapidly turning into The Pirate Bay farce, I referred to the 1p2U (one penny to you) micro-payments programme Crosbie Fitch has been grafting away at.
He’s been on it for quite a while and I asked him how it’s going.
“1p2U is in what is known as ‘live alpha’,” he said. “That means it hasn’t been ‘launched’ to great fanfare, but it can start being tested by those willing to put up with a few bugs, glitches, sluggishness and certain features missing. More information is available at 1p2u.com (for bloggers as well as those who think some of them write articles worth paying a penny for).”
Is that you? If it is, take it for a drive.
Meanwhile, as I also said in the post, p2pnet will be signing up for 1p2u.com, and I’m really happy about that.
Why?
Because it meshes nicely with the way things should be, IMHO.
Here’s a key phrase: “1p2U is all about providing an incentive, but an ethical one.”
It’s not a donation — you have to work for it
“It’s a little widget you put on your blog 
,” Crosbie says on the site, going on »»»
- It lets your readers become paying subscribers.
- Subscribers pay you a penny for each article you write.
- You can get it in 5 steps.
- The FAQ answers more of your questions.
And here’s how he summed 1p2U up for this post »»»
It’s one penny to you. However, it’s not a donation – you have to work for it. If you publish a new article (your word to the world) then you get that penny.
But, where does that penny come from? It comes from your audience, from those who like what you publish and who like it so much they feel that a penny is a good bargain. They won’t give you anything for what you’ve already done, but for what you will do for that penny.
In the case of p2pnet, some readers may well feel that each article Jon publishes is, on average, worth paying him a penny to publish – whether he writes it himself, or whether he carefully selects and re-presents an article written by someone else.
The penny pays Jon for his work in producing the news his readers want to read. On the other hand, if Jon stops publishing articles he stops getting pennies, or if he stops publishing good articles, he loses subscribers.
1p2U is all about providing an incentive, but an ethical one.
Of course, some p2pnet readers may think some of the writers that Jon publishes are also worth incentivising, and so you can make the same deal with them, offering them a penny for each article they write. It’s your money, you decide where to spend it – or not.
1p2U.com is a paradigm inversion
Instead of a publisher charging you a penny in exchange for giving you an authorised copy of their news, you pay the publisher a penny in exchange for them publishing the news. In both cases, you only pay if you think it’s a good bargain, but with 1p2U your liberty to make copies and derivatives is restored.
So copyright doesn’t come into it. Jon has no need of a monopoly. You can copy what you’ve paid for until the cows come home, and can resell it on your own blog without royalty or fear of prosecution.
It’s not the copy that’s valuable, but the work that went into it. Once that’s been paid for, the copies are free, the public is free, you are free.
How 1p2U works is fairly straightforward. It simply monitors a blogger’s RSS feed and each time an item is published, it debits a penny from each person who has subscribed to it via 1p2U, and credits that penny to the blogger.
Subscribers can pay their dues (for bloggers to collect) at their convenience (when that feature has been enabled in the beta testing phase).
1p2U doesn’t charge any commission fees. It is to make money the same way, by letting the people who want to pay for work on improvements do so.
Coming soon.
Right, Crosbie? 
Jon Newton – p2pnet
The Pirate Bay farce – What`s up with The Pirate Bay? Part II, August 30, 2009
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August 31st, 2009 at 9:00 pm
That sounds like a fantastic idea!,i’d much rather reach in to my pocket freely and pay than have my money surgically extracted by lawyers!.I hope it catches on but i can’t see Rupert Murdoch making the change anytime soon.
August 31st, 2009 at 9:20 pm
The only issue I see with this is how to send the money to the author efficiently. It would make sense for subscribers to wait until the pennies add up to a significant amount before paying the dues, say at the end of every month. Yet even with waiting, online money-transfer services like PayPal are taking increasingly large slices out of payments. I wish there was a companion service that would let me essentially put dollar bills in an envelope and mail them to somebody, only online. No “service charges” save for what it actually costs to make such a transfer.
August 31st, 2009 at 9:34 pm
Oops sorry!,i obviously read this story before the other one.I “misprested “him too,i mean James Murdoch.