Micropayments and the gift economy

Related link: http://shirky.com/writings/fame_vs_fortune.html

Clay Shirky lambasts BitPass, a new micropayment system designed to let content creators set a price of 25 cents or less for a piece of content on the web. Shirky argues that people don't want to think about how much a piece of information is worth:

First off, you can only truly judge the worth of a piece of content after you've ingested said content -- not beforehand. Second, the general populous has enough problems with fractions as it is, so how can one expect people to judge miniscule values everytime they want to read some piece of content on the net?

I agree with Shirky that micropayments for content online are doomed to fail. However, let's turn the tables and instead of an artificial scarcity based model, consider a gift economy model. Micropayments in the gift economy model do make sense -- after you've read a piece of content you have a feel for the value of the content. This makes it much easier to determine if a piece of content met your expectations and whether or not you should donate the suggested donation for the content.

Furthermore, in a gift economy every participant is equal. Every person can be a giver or a receiver -- BitPass makes a distinction between the two and has spenders and earners. While the website is in Beta it looks to be easier to become a spender than an earner, and therefore the two participants are not equal. I think the only difference between an earner and a spender should be reflected in their actions.

Finally, Shirky argues that micropayents present unreasonable mental transaction costs -- if you're constantly thinking about the worth of a piece of content in terms small fractions of a dollar, it does get pretty tedious. In a gift economy the content consumer can decide how much to donate to the content producer, since the consumer is not held to some arbitrary price. I can see creating systems where the mental transaction costs can be shrunk to a small one time mental transaction cost.

For instance, when the user sets up their gift economy based micropayment account the user should be able to set a standard donation price for various pieces of content. A weblog entry could be 1/100th of cent. An image 1/10th of cent. An article a nickel. A song $.25. A movie could be priced at at $1. Whatever the user decides.

After the user ingested piece of content, the software/website/whatever could ask the user: "Was this article what you expected? (Totally, mostly, marginally, not at all)" If the user responds with totally the entire predetermined amount gets donated to the content creator. 66% for mostly, 33% for marginally and nothing for not at all.

The mental transaction cost of this is minimal. The consumer will instinctively have a reaction to a piece of content and answering one question is drop dead simple.

So, I disagree that micropayment systems across the board will fail -- there are useful models. However, paying for content before you've ingested said content, is not one of those models.

What other uses for micropayments do you see?