The blog mooooooved...

There's a cow pun in that title. "Mooooooved." Get it? Never mind.

Anyway, I got a nice e-mail from Ivan Kirigin of TipJoy (who, by the way, apparently now works for Facebook?) regarding the now infamous domain-with-a-dash permutation over at tip-joy.com.

(I'm still working on the cow poems. As my girls get older, genuine cow art might not be far behind.)

Ivan's not interested in buying the dash-domains (which makes sense, given that he's not pursuing the TipJoy project anymore) but he was concerned that people might get confused with all the micropayments talk here on this blog.

Fair enough. So, rather than keeping this on the dirt-cheap .info domain that I picked up at the same time I bought tip-joy.com, at Ivan's request I moved it over to my own personal "collective" domain. Further micropayments discussion will happen here, at inv.ention.net/micropayments.

(That's been a fun domain to have through the years. There's already a lot of traffic for fairly obscure cable TV hostesses at the sister site: att.ention.net. I'm building an empire of random stuff, one subdirectory at a time...)

For the record (for anyone who's reading this looking for internet-related advice), blowing an old domain completely away -- the .info site throws 404s right now and will eventually just redirect at a top level over to tip-joy.com -- is a horrible thing to do for SEO ("Search Engine Optimization"). If you were/are running a business and were doing this "for real," you'd never do that. Instead, you'd set up redirects so the old content is still "live" to Google and the rest, but gently directs everyone over to the new web site.

But in this situation, we really do want the old content "gone" -- there's nothing to be gained by people getting confused about the facts that a) TipJoy really is no more and b) I've got absolutely nothing to do with TipJoy or any other micropayment service. Not that there was confusion before... but we might as well head it off at the pass.

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How do artists get paid?

For various reasons I've been thinking about how an artist could get compensated for his or her work. Now that tipjoy.com has gone under, there's one less service available... though something like the PayPal micropayments that are used on our parent site could be nearly as good; other than reducing fees (which PayPal has effectively done in its own micropayments offering), I don't see much value in "aggregation services."

So what's the real problem? In general, I'm betting that people (let alone "average internet users") don't really like to pay for things that they already have. Granted, the iTunes store took MP3s out of the realm of "theft" and into the legitimate world of "purchase"... but, other than that, do we have an examples where people pull out their wallets to compensate someone for content that's freely available?

Of course, this is nothing new. The great art of hundreds of years ago was bought and paid for by a patron who wanted it... so maybe the only sustainable financial model is for free content to disappear and "subscription" (or even "pay-to-create") content will replace it? That's the way newspapers are going, right?

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