Comics and Micropayments: An Interview with Todd Allen

Confessions of an Aca/Fan: The Official Weblog of Henry Jenkins: Comics and Micropayments: An Interview with Todd Allen

Comics and Micropayments, it just won't go away. Everybody wants to make some money off the internet (hey, the Dragon wouldn't mind...) and the webcomics/micropayments debate flash up every now and then like 5 year olds arguing over whether the Hulk could take Superman. This is a pretty good summation of how webcomics and micropayments have evolved since Scott McCloud got Gary Groth all in a tizzy about it, right as the dot com bubble bombed.

When McCloud spoke at MIT last week, he told me that Reinventing Comicswas designed to be a book about the future when it was published more than five years ago and it was still a book about the future now. We are just moving towards the future at a slower rate than any of us might have imagined. The success of iTunes suggests that people are willing to pay small amounts of money online to consume content they want (and thus suggests that some micropayments model might still make sense). At the same time, they are doing so through a central distribution channel which could easily become a gatekeeper locking lots of content producer out.

via /.