Friday, June 24, 2005

Whatever happened to ...

RedPaper? Great pay-for-content model, good buzz ... it had everything going for it. It's still a very sound idea, and it should be doing better than it is.

I published via RedPaper for awhile. As a matter of fact, you can still buy my ebooklets Roulette for the Leisure Gambler and Tom Knapp's No Bullshit Guide to E-Zine Publishing, as well as chapters one and two and 3 thru 6 of my still-unfinished novel The Halaunbrenner Grant there. (Note: Don't buy Writing the Libertarian Op-Ed there -- it's now available free in the files area of the Rational Review News Digest list.)

My main endeavor at RedPaper was a daily news and commentary roundup -- a subset of RRND -- which I quit doing because I was really busy and something had to go. I always meant to publish more there, and just may start doing so.

The RedPaper model is simple: You make a small PayPal deposit (two or three bucks, I think), and establish an account out of which micropayments can be made for individual pieces of content. By moving these tiny transactions onto their site, RedPaper solved the problem of PayPal's commissions, which essentially make any transaction of less than 50 cents or so -- in practice, a buck or less -- a wash. When you sell on RedPaper, the micropayments accumulate in a different account, which you can roll back over into PayPal whenever you think there's enough there to make it worth doing so.

If it's a buzz thing, hopefully I've done my part -- a RedPaper Renaissance would be nice.

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