Overview

Why FairPay?

The world of digital content/services is turbulent because the invisible hand no longer operates.  Information wants to be free, because, once created, it has no inherent scarcity.  

Businesses have countered that by creating artificial scarcity (paywalls).  But that is, well, artificial.  Like Wyle E. Coyote running off a cliff, there is no support for any price.  Hence turbulence.

The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence, it is to act with yesterday’s logic. (--Peter Drucker)

The invisible hand is yesterday’s logic.  We need a new logic.  FairPay is that new logic.

Most people actually want to pay for quality content/services…when asked to sustain the creation of content/service they value, at customized prices they feel are fair for them given the value they perceive was provided.  

FairPay is a framework for working with your customers to ask just that – at whatever level of sophistication you are ready for (and retaining as much control as you demand). It offers a guiding framework for the new Relationship Economy.

The principles of FairPay apply not only to digital content/services, but to any service that has low marginal cost, in the context of a continuing digital relationship. That will gradually include more and more of commerce as automation and robotics shift the world to an economy of abundance.

FairPay can re-focus capitalism on profiting from win-win alignment with its customers (and other stakeholders).  It is also applicable to value exchange relationships with non-profit organizations.

Overview of FairPay

FairPay is a radically innovative framework for relationship-centered, “customer-value-first” revenue strategies for the digital era. Its varying forms can be adapted across a wide spectrum of business contexts, both for-profit and non-profits.  It is an open architecture in the public domain, not a product (and I am working on this as a pro-bono project).

FairPay: Adaptively Win-Win Customer Relationships, Reisman's 2016 book, was praised as “an innovative and visionary methodology,” "groundbreaking," a "radically new perspective," "promises to transform business."

At a narrow level, FairPay is a powerful unconventional strategy for mass-customized, value-based pricing of subscriptions and other recurring relationships.

• In Techonomy, a recent concise overview of the specific strategy, Information Wants to be Free; Consumers May Want to Pay.
• In the Journal of Revenue and Pricing Management, more substantively, A novel architecture to monetize digital offerings, still more in Australasian Marketing Journal, Pricing in Consumer Digital Markets: A Dynamic Framework (winner of Industry Relevance Award), and an earlier introduction in Harvard Business Review.
• A detailed use case, Patron-izing Journalism -- Beyond Paywalls, Meters, and Membership.
• A simpler and more conventional "80/20" step toward customizing digital subscriptions, "Risk-Free" Subscriptions to The Celestial Jukebox?
• The game theory algorithm enabling this, FairPay Changes the "Game" of Commerce.

At a broad level, FairPay informs a “unified consumer relationship theory,” that puts the full spectrum of B2C revenue strategy options into a customer-value-based continuum (subscriptions, meters, memberships, voluntary/participatory crowdfunding, freemium, premium tiers, micropayments, dynamic pricing, bundling, acquisition, retention, advertising, etc. – across the entire customer lifetime journey). It draws on a set of key elements that can be applied in various combinations suited to diverse business contexts.

• A big-picture overview post, The Relationship Economy -- It's All About Valuing Customer Experiences
• A similar deck and video overview from my recent New York Angels Webinar, Rethinking Revenue Models for Digital Services
• A more structured guide, The Elements of Next-Gen Relationships and Pricing -- A Unifying Framework
• A short post that gets to the heart of the value-based approach, The Ghost of Pricing Future -- A Thought Experiment
• How this applies to the full spectrum of services, including non-profits, A Platform for Teaching Men to Fish -- "Revenue-as-a-Service" for Non-Profit Impact
• Some even broader implications, The Reformation of Market Capitalism in The Age of the Customer -- Profiting From "Social Responsibility as a Service."

Additional background is in this list of Selected Items.

FairPay has generated interest from major businesses, startups and VCs, and academia.  It has strong foundations in behavioral economics, and sheds light on many knotty issues and perverse incentives that are often poorly understood.

>>>More information and guide to selected posts.

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(An older, longer overview was saved in mid-2019)