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Google's got it down well with AdSense (sure, there're complaints and complainers, legitimate ones, too, but it works well for a lot of people and businesses, and they're working on improvements).

Once you've got the self-contained ecosystem (i.e. where the "currency" remains within the "GRealm"), it's doable. e.g. A publisher racks up dimes in her account by selling click-throughs to her popular blog articles. Those dimes are worth the full US$.10 so long as they're applied to her AdWords account, or Google Base purchases. When she requests a disbursement, Google takes its cut before sending the Cash Money Check.

If you can extend the GRealm (or YRealm, or MSRealm, etc.) to a large enough universe, it'd work very well for a lot of people (producers as well as consumers).

There've been *so* many Close But No Cigars on this front, and there are many interesting contenders now.

When someone with a compellingly-encompassing realm pulls it off, it adds another tier to the Free->Semi-Free->Subscription-Only models that exist today and "web 3.0" will be well on its way.

Steve

http://meanbusiness.com/

I don't think so. http://www.bitpass.com/

Another option is bitpass.

Paypal is now cheaper for transactions of more than 50 cents, but bitpass still provides a working solution (and they are cheaper for transactions of less than 50 cents). Bitpass also offers additional functionality for securing content, but it sounds like you wouldn't need any of that.

BitPass has had micropayments for some time... the catch is you have to buy at least $3 credits, but then you can pay those anonymously to websites in increments as small as one cent.

You might be interested in http://www.bitpass.com/ for micropayments. Sounds good in principle but I've not yet implemented any of it on my site...

Rolling your own is begging to be owned.

Ignore people's unease, the real reason you don't want to go w/ paypal is the massive bite they take out of whatever people send you. You can't even ask people to donate a quarter because the entire quarter disappears.

Google for "amazon honor system" (minus quotes). I can't link you directly because it'll probably end up w/ a referral to me in the URL. ^^;; It might be what you're looking for.

Alternatively, for webcomic creators, Scott McCloud suggests trying BitPass, Yaga or Peppercoin...

This guy had the same idea over a year ago, except he created a "a mash-up style remix" of 9 silent songs. Not only that, he's selling the result for $0.99.

For micropayments, check out BitPass. Their biz model is unique in the fact they sell the equivlient of prepaid phone cards. You can buy a $3 BitPass virtual card and use it to pay sites as little as a penny at a time. (Not affililated with them, just implementing a project using their system).

I'm not keen on giving out my credit card number to every single band's website. I've enjoyed lots of music I bought via Bitpass and have found the process to be easy and fast. I've even got a few bucks left in my account earmarked for the next indie band I like.

If you're going to set up a store, please make Bitpass one of your payment options. Thanks.

I'm suprised no one has mentioned BitPass this is quite a mature micropayment system, the first one Scot MacCloud (of online comic fame) though good enough.

I already pay for internet access; why would I want to, or should I have to, pay for something which is currently free? So why do the ISP's get the internet dolars? Surely content providers deserve some slice of the cake.

As a very skint content provider, I actually think that I'm out compeating myself. We provide an online and highly rated database of information about plants, and also an offline version for sale. But hardly anyone want to actually buy the data as its free online. Sometimes I feel like just withdrawing the online version to boost sales. A good micropayment system could help keep such services online, indeed it might even stimulate more higher quality information on the internet.

Why publish for free?

Suppose that each spammer in your example above had to endure a 3 sec latency before the SMTP session would begin. That would add a net 300,000 seconds to their delivery time (using your numbers of 100,000 emails).

An interesting idea. How does this help if the spammers use hijacked computers? They are already using hijacked computers for DOS attacks and to get around SMTP blacklists.

And will the delay hurt legit mailing lists (like the Linux kernel hackers mailing list) more than it will hurt spammers?

I mean, what agencies / governments / banks would I need to contact when I wanted to setup a new mail server?

No one... except at least one micropayments company.

Who do I contact in case of dispute? Who arbitrates the money transfer? Even with International currency conversion? In Real Time?

Simple: the answer to all of those questions is "the micropayments company".

Still, you have put your finger on the major problem with the idea. The idea does assume a micropayments system that is reasonably universally accepted, can handle a high volume of transactions, does not charge a large fee per transaction... Does such a micropayments company exist yet?

I only know of one micropayments company right now: bitpass.com. I don't know if they meet the requirements for this idea, or not.

Whether bitpass.com will work or not, I am certain that micropayments will common in the future. The cost of running a database server capable of handling micropayments traffic isn't going up, it's going down. And micropayments will be useful.

steveha

After reading the Shirky article, and Scott McCloud's rebuttal, in which he rakes Shirky over the coals for criticizing Bitpass based on its state that the time when Shirky looked at it, I took another look at Bitpass, and also at Peppercoin.

My fellow Slashdotters, this is rubbish. There's not a single thing there that I want to buy, not for a quarter, not for a penny, not for a mill, not for a peppercorn.

Nobody forced Bitpass and Peppercoin to put up "Grand Opening" signs and hire brass bands to promote a giant warehouse store with nothing in it to buy but two magazines and three candybars at the checkout line. It makes them look really stupid. If they didn't want people to see them before they were ready, they could have waited to crank up the publicity machine until they were ready.

There's nothing to argue about here (unless you're personally invested in the systems). Bitpass and Peppercoin can prove me wrong any time they want. McCloud implies that Bitpass is the next eBay (by saying that eBay wouldn't have looked any more impressive when it was the same age Bitpass is). Fine, maybe I'll have accounts with both of them in a year. In which case I'll be glad to say I was mistaken.

But as of today, it sure smells like dot-bomb smoke to me.

PayPal made sense practically from day one. I joined PayPal because there was a guy that had a self-published book I wanted to buy--a very good book about the history of Apple--and his website offered me the choice of mailing him a check or signing up for PayPal and using a credit card. Nobody had to talk me into it. I didn't have to engage in theoretical arguments about whether PayPal was a viable system. There was something I wanted to buy. I wanted the convenience of buying by credit card from someone who didn't have a merchant account. I glanced a leery eye at PayPal's terms and conditions, shrugged, and signed up. PayPal has been continuously useful to me every since.

Peppercoin and Bitpass are a joke. Spare me articles about them until there is something worthwhile I can buy with them.

Move along, folks, there's nothing to buy here.

With Bitpass, at least, you can go to their site and click on the "Share" tab.

They don't have a HUGE number of clients yet, but it seems to be growing pretty fast.

Small sites usually do not control their own webservers and are hosted along with other sites.
What BitPass is asking is to install a 'gateway' to allow their service to work. They claim the service will thus work in 30 minutes. In the majority of cases, with small sites, there will however be extra hassle because of the way BitPass has to be installed.
It could even be impossible to install BitPass on cohosted sites, who knows ?

Ofcourse it's still a beta, but they got to do better than that...

Small sites usually do not control their own webservers and are hosted along with other sites.
What BitPass is asking is to install a 'gateway' to allow their service to work. They claim the service will thus work in 30 minutes. In the majority of cases, with small sites, there will however be extra hassle because of the way BitPass has to be installed.
It could even be impossible to install BitPass on cohosted sites, who knows ?

Ofcourse it's still a beta, but they got to do better than that...

Try this.

If your CD is not in CD Baby already, our original $35 CD Baby set up still applies. That $35 is for the warehousing and work to have it on cdbaby.com. This $40 is for the additional work for years of digital distribution.

Did you follow the links in Shirky's essay?

Here's one of them: "Some instances define the term micropayment as low-value electronic financial transactions [23]. What the word 'low-value' actually means, usually depends rather heavily on the micropayment system in question. Generally, the value of an individual micropayment range as much as from a fraction of a cent to a few dollars."

Shirky's argument holds for transactions in the fraction of a cent range, but even for $0.25 transactions, it falls apart.

It is just not possible to get the associated per-transaction costs down low enough to make true micropayments work.

The BitPass model is essentially the prepaid phonecard model applied to online content. It's not rocket science. If you doubt that it works, go give it a try.

To be honest, I wasn't very familiar with Scott or his comics, but after having read the article I decided to take a look and try out this micro-payment thing. So I clicked through to the BitPass site, and dropped my Visa number to get a $3.00 credit. Pretty quick and painless. I also noted that Paypal is an option also.

Now, having gone through the payment process, I clicked the button again and was taken right to Scott's comic. The Flash transition of the pages is pretty cool. It's easy to read, and turning the page with the click of a key is not a bad way to read a comic. I even liked the story. It was a good way to start my day, reading a nice little mini novella with a main character that I can relate to - being all into the mathematical probabilities and stuff.

And it was only 25 fucking cents!

I think I'm going to become a regular reader of his comics now, and any other author who can make this kind of cool content available in a cool and affordable way.

I've been reading some posts where people still complain about the stuff not being free, or how the micropayment stuff won't work because sniff, it won't work for teenagers who don't have a credit card, or whine, what about my european currency transfer rate? While it is their right to complain, the fact is that this kind of technology is GOOD. The RIAA and MPAA should take note.

I think the BitPass Approach is not new at all: With PayPal, one can put money into a "online repository" as well and then spend small parts of it at will.

The only difference that I see is that PayPal has 10 Million members that you can send your money too, while BitPass currently only has three.

There is another service that follows a different, more radical approach: Ipaya. Will be interesting to see what happens with them...

Even worse than that is their 'after-thought-esque' privacy policy. I'll consider signing up when they spend as much time drafting that as they do on their ToS.

Even worse than that is their 'after-thought-esque' privacy policy. I'll consider signing up when they spend as much time drafting that as they do on their ToS.

I'm not too familiar with Bitpass, but it seems to me that they should have Bitpass pre-paid cards that you can buy for cash in stores (ala Calling Cards)... then you just 'activate' the card by typing in the serial number and adding the money into your online account.