Paying Artists Online: RepliCounts for New E-commerce

content is free while the artists get paid

Immediate, Accountable Fundraising

A. Partnership between Artist(s) and Cause(s)

One way to use RepliCounts for fundraising would be to get artists to donate some or all of the online revenue from a particular work -- perhaps all the revenue from sponsorships sold by members of the charity or other recipient organization (helping the cause or charity, while promoting the artist for the price of a song). Replicating accounts can each inherit well-tested machinery for keeping track of these sponsorships, turning over money immediately, and reporting results to the recipient, and/or to the public.

For example, when a (volunteer or professional) fundraiser receives a significant sponsorship, either the sponsor, the individual who asked for the money, or the recipient organization's accounting operation could check a public Web site showing a thermometer or other indicator of money raised so far. A click would re-display the thermometer as a bar graph of individual contributions, organized by date and time. While the donor's name might be private, anyone involved (or maybe anyone at all) could check that the exact sum expected was received at the time the sponsor's bankcard or other payment was processed (or when it became final, especially for large donations).

If the RepliCounts system charges 0.5% of all money handled (which we think is a reasonable ballpark), then 99.5% of the contribution will reach the artist(s) and/or charity or cause. Donors (sponsors) will know that almost all of their money is available for immediate use, seconds after the payment becomes final. Small payments could be credited immediately, and refunded automatically if necessary, increasing the sense of immediacy.

B. Fundathon and Games

RepliCounts could provide infrastructure for fundraising contests or games -- instantly crediting each donation to the correct individual and team of fundraisers, while updating the campaign's public or private thermometers or other measures of success. When something works, the infrastructure can be inherited for new campaigns.

We like the "fundathon" idea -- instead of the walking, biking, bar crawls, and other diversions for the cause, focus volunteers' attention on raising money, the more the better. The team that raises the most by the end of a round wins that round.

A winning strategy will likely involve developing relationships ahead of time with potential major donors. Various excellence could be recognized: top team or teams in whole the game (all rounds), top team in each round, top individual fundraisers, etc. -- and the donors of course. Note that the different teams could be raising money for the same cause -- or for different, or even rival or bitterly opposed causes competing in the same game. They all need money.

Some of these games will get media attention (including on the sports pages, eventually?), with proper promotion, including cultivation of celebrities. Unlike conventional sports, this fundathon includes public participation. Anyone can jump in, wherever in the world they are, and the public (or even a single big donor) can totally change the outcome of the game -- thereby raising more money for the cause, of course.

Perhaps most importantly, a fundathon focused on major donations will provide a new context and occasion for asking for money (and asking for a lot, right now, before the next game deadline tomorrow or whenever). The grim stuff (dying kids for example) is still there and everyone will know it, but the game offers a light context as a surrogate, helping people avoid grimness fatigue. The light, less emotional reasons to ask for money should help many people get started in volunteer fundraising, to overcome their reluctance to ask for money -- and give them and experienced fundraisers as well a lighter space to explore new money ideas.

And certainly we need new ideas. A critical problem today is that fundraising takes over as the real main purpose of charitable organizations, which get leaders who are good at raising money but not so good at accomplishing the mission. It's time to be aggressive about finding alternatives.

Example: Spam Control (by User-Centered Payment, Without Encryption)

In most of these examples, RepliCounts only receive money; they not to spend it. This one (and sometimes the consulting example as well) is the exception.

The Real Spam Problem

Email addresses used only for private communication are usually not spammed. Problems happen when somebody wants to be available to large groups, strangers, or the general public -- but not for ads for sex products, gambling, stock scams, quack remedies, etc. Charging five cents or 10 cents a message, at a special email address at a service set up for this purpose, would stop almost all ordinary spam. Any email that arrives without payment would be held as junk. The addressee could look at it but normally would not need to, since regular personal email would never come to this address.

Email addresses used only for private communication are usually not spammed. The problem happens when the address owner wants to communicate with the public -- either with anybody, or with companies that demand an email address for this or that. Hopefully most of these companies will have a good privacy policy and actually use it. But as the number of untrusted correspondents increases, the chance that all of them are trustworthy approaches zero. And just one breach is enough to get an email address into the spam marketplace.

So if the recipient could just charge whatever amount they wanted to receive an email at a special address, and easily whitelist the companies he or she is doing business with, then much of the problem will be solved. The spam business model seldom allows even the smallest payment. At 5 cents, for example, sending 100,000 spams costs $5,000 -- when otherwise it would be almost free.

Other Advantages of Premium Email

Meanwhile, experts, celebrities or others in demand might decide to charge more to receive an email from a stranger. A modest charge, perhaps a few dollars for which they might agree to personally read the first fifty words or whatever, would paradoxically make the celebrities more accessible not less to people who had a real reason to contact them, but had no back-door connection -- while reducing a flood of incoming mail resulting from easy publication of an address, to a manageable flow. We believe that the access will be particularly important in opening the whole system more to outsiders with good ideas, not only the same insiders every time whether they have a good idea or not.

Also, celebrities can need money -- more than most people realize. Especially in case of sudden fame, there may be no mechanism quickly available to turn the fame into even modest living expenses, so opportunities to use the unexpected luck, the viral spread or whatever, get lost. Or an ordinary person may be unjustly accused in a headline-making case. In these and other situations, charging for email could provide much-needed income. Celebrities or well-known experts who are temporarily without other means might even make a living for a time, just by receiving emails.

AOL's Mistake

AOL wanted to charge selected corporations for good delivery of their email. Clearly this model wouldn't work, unless unpaid delivery was less than good. And the end users had no say, except to change their email addresses. Nonprofits that used email heavily, including cancer-support organizations, would have been hit with fees they could not pay.

A Better Way

In our proposal persons who wants to hear from strangers (including untrusted organizations that demand an email address in order to do business with them) will take the initiative, and open a new email address with a special service that offers premium email from strangers (and easy whitelisting for the less-than-trusted businesses, which can always be unwhitelisted later, meaning that they could pay the 5 cents or whatever to get through). Then people with the special premium email account can manage their regular, free email addresses more securely. Spammers would have to know or guess an address that someone had whitelisted, and forge that address -- a high barrier for tens of thousands of different addresses from very different people.

There are existing options, such as Spam Arrest, or temporary email addresses. But many senders would rather pay 5 cents to get through immediately and probably be seen, without having to get whitelisted first. And many recipients would rather get paid, and become more accessible thereby, vs. having the hassle of temporary email addresses that need to keep going away and not give a forwarding address.

How Replicating Accounts Can Help

Since replicating accounts can automatically inherit services and settings at birth, they can feasibly manage more complex services than ordinary online accounts. For example, a new RepliCount might only have $1 in it; when the dollar has been spent, that account will disappear forever. That dollar can send 20 emails at 5 cents, enough to block ordinary spam. Since most people don't need to send emails to strangers all that often, the $1 account could last for some time.

Here's how the process will work. First of course someone will need to set up a service that offers the premium email accounts. (This service will be paid perhaps 1% of the price the emails coming in, leaving 99% for the recipient; and depending on the details, it might also collect 100% of amounts paid in advance, but never used or reclaimed within an agreed period of perhaps a year.) Then customers of that service will set up an account with it and receive a new email address, which requires 5 cents (or some other amount) to accept an email. These customers will publish or otherwise distribute their new, premium email address to people who might use it.

Then anyone who wants to send an email to one of those customers will need to set up a RepliCount with some money in it. (In the early days of RepliCounts, this must be on the same server that also handles the premium email service; later, different RepliCounts systems will set up payment arrangements with each other, when there is mutual trust.) Assume that the new RepliCount is a 15-digit random number (which we suggested as a default, elsewhere on this site). The sender would include that number in the email (it could be included anywhere in the body -- or it might be required in the first line for more convenience and efficiency).

For security, this RepliCount will have a low value in it (the $1, or whatever the owner chooses), and also will be restricted to pay only the email service (at a public account the service published for that purpose). For any other purpose, the RepliCount will be worthless, since it cannot pay anybody else.

Assume that the premium email is sent insecurely, as many emails still are. Even if the email is intercepted in transit, criminals will have quite a hurdle to use it. First, their harvesting software will need to recognize the RepliCount, which may not be marked in any special way. They will know what server it is being sent to. But all they can do with that stolen RepliCount is to use it to send from zero through 19 spam emails through that server (they won't know how many). That's some trouble to steal less than a dollar, and risk because it leaves a trail as well; any spam sent that way is not only a spam violation, but also is clearly a theft. Maybe someday spammers will have software to automatically perform and cover up thousands of such thefts, and manage the whole process. But that will take a while, and if it ever happens, RepliCounts can counter it easily by automatically generating a new RepliCount each time, good for one payment only. Then the criminals must intercept the email, recognize the RepliCount in it, pay the server for their own spam email before the server receives the legitimate email, and avoid leaving a trail -- all to steal 5 cents to get one spam message through the premium email service fraudulently.

Example: Instant Spot Consulting

Specialized consultants might use the same email system -- but set a price such as $50 for 15 minutes of their best effort to answer a question or provide advice. There would also be a reputation system run by the premium-email company, in which people who actually paid could rate their satisfaction with the consultant.

For security, they could be paid by a one-use RepliCount that can only pay the exact value the consultant charges -- nothing more, but also nothing less.

Of course they could also pay the consult using PayPal etc.; RepliCounts isn't necessary here, as it is for a 5-cent payment. But RepliCounts will be more convenient. As long as the payer has enough money in any RepliCount, email software could be set up to use it, with the sender either entering or approving the exact amount. Just click Send, and that's it.

Of course the consultant would have published standard rules for the interaction (or started with them and customized as needed). By default the consultant might have 24 non-holiday hours to complete the job and respond with an email, keeping the money; the consultant could change that time up or down, and the party needing the service would decide whether to offer the job to that consultant. Not responding for the specified time would reject the job, though good practice would be to reject it ASAP. And with the rejection, the consultant might volunteer a sentence or two on how to make the job clear, and otherwise doable -- perhaps then getting the job that otherwise could not be done because of its poor description.

An exchange for such consulting will let companies that run into a problem outside their focus area get a quick take from a national or world authority -- immediately and cheaply, without the usual overhead of contracting with the consultant. Since these consultants would be specialists, they could check off the most relevant Web links or other boilerplate, with optional annotations, to accompany their overall take on the situation.

There are already consultant exchanges like this, often used for outsourcing. We believe RepliCounts can improve on these, for certain jobs, by carrying the infrastructure to offer a variety of choices among more scripted, quicker, less expensive interactions. Fifteen minutes best effort, delivered within hours as a single reply to a single email without additional negotiation, and with follow-up available as needed, looks like a fast, efficient way to add value.

Page updated 2010-05-17