Here's another startup in the act of biting dust. Micropayment company Bitpass is shutting the doors. The only thing that ever gave me the slightest reason to want to use them is that Scott McCloud's online comics and Telltale Weekly both used them. In fact, McCloud was involved in the company as an advisor. I guess the closing of Bitpass kind of cuts the legs out from under this argument.

There was a time that I thought micropayments were a pretty good way to go for online content. I've since flipped. I know think that rather than aggregating together lots of little payments from most or all of your fans, better to aggregate all your fans into one excited group that occasionally buys bigger ticket items. Rather than having every listener pay $0.10 per show, having 1% of them buy your t-shirt or paper collection of your webcomic or whatever may make you more money overall.