(Warning: Disorganized Thoughts Ahead) Dru over at Misnomer has been reflecting on voluntary payments and enabling micropayments for web self publishing. That got me thinking about what opportunities I have to pay for commodities after I can fully assess their value. The only situations I could think of were tipping for service and throwing money to street performers. Even when I donate money to an organization, I am not absolutely sure what they are going to do with it. I am trusting their past performance. Suspending reality for a minute, what if I could pay for a movie after I saw it? Would I always pay some base fee that I felt represented my appreciation for the effort made to entertain me and then tack on an additional amount that expressed my enjoyment of the film? It seems that service or live entertainment is more suited to the concept of paying afterwards because the people involved have an incentive to please you. Back to the subject of web publishing, if I wanted to collect payment for my published thoughts, I’d probably want the reader to decide how much they wanted to pay. Information has different value to different people. Although, as Dru says, most information becomes more valuable as more people see it, there are intellectual properties that are more valuable (or, more precisely, profitable) if only a few people know about them. And how best to benefit from potentially profitable intellectual property is something a writer needs to figure out. As a reader, I’d pay the most for writing that was emotionally moving, hilarious or extremely thought provoking. Bonus for all three.