I really hate stories like this that the New York Times lifts from the tech press uncritically. The definition of a scientific experiment as "scientific" is when you can replicate the results. You can't, with something like this, because it's a one-off -- and possibly even a one-off for this one comic. It isn't science, but a medicine show.
There's always one copyleftist Internet nerd -- like Cory Doctorow -- who steps up and claims that "you can make a living giving away your books". But he makes a living from giving lectures for fees...lectures about how you can make money giving away books.
And now there's this guy -- but half the way he's making his $5 right now is because the tech press and now the mainstream media are hyping him. The volume of $5 sales wouldn't be happening if it weren't for this artificial injection of old-fashioned old media attention. Take that away, and you just have one more guy undercutting the market who eventually can't keep selling himself short.
Have the credibility to tune into this guy 6-9-18 months from now and let us know if this "magic" is still working, hmmm?
The next guy to come along can't get noticed -- there's room for *one* or *very few* of these guys in various separate fields, not thousands. (That's why the miracle band that gives CDs away and makes all its money on a jingle some moviemaker purchased isn't replicable for *all* musicians, even all really good ones -- there's room for *just one* or *just a few*.)
It's really a disservice to all artists to undercut them all in this way, implying that they all need to give away their content for free or for only $5 to "make it".
Sure, the Internet needs to be revised to get people paid, with easy and secure payment systems and a philosophy that very deliberately links commerce, content as commodity (not freebie), and community. That day will come when SOPA is passed and this freebie Creative Communism stuff burns off as so much fog.
The mythical "long tail" is not a solution for getting content creators paid. The money and efforts required to get the attention (it's an attention economy) to those special vertebrae on the long tail are *just too high*. You have an artificial bubble here when you get the attention on the long tail *with old-fashioned media like the New York Times*.
It's like all those Twitter miracles of fund-raising -- they raised money by getting an old-fashioned newspaper to write about their fund-raising on Twitter.
Of course, Google has always loved the idea of the long tail taking over and search as king, instead of marketers and those "evil middle men" like record companies because then Google gets to be the middleman, providing search for you to find your spot on the long tail -- except, that won't come cheap, as your tail piece will have to have paid ads to get seen, given all the stampede of people coming online thinking they can make $5 a comedy hour...
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