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That does sound interesting, but for larger scale check out Clickshare (http://www.clickshare.com). They have quite a robust system that allows payments as low as you want. The system is mostly being used as a way integrate subscription access control and billing without much change to your existing site, but it works fine for article sale and whatnot.

It isn't really a viable solution for places that wouldn't have a total charge to the user of over a few dollars. Basically no Credit Card system would be due to the charges involved from the cc companies. But clickshare can conglomerate a user's charges and only run them every couple of days or say, once a month.

It's quite ingenious, as it allows you to set up pricing tables and such for different pages or sets of pages. Best of all runs on linux or windows servers and requires no client side code or javascript (not sure about cookies).

There is a lot more to clickshare, like allowing sites to sell stuff without having to register users. Also sites that do register users can make money off of their users purchasing at other sites. Check out the website if you are interested. clickshare

Also, Paypal does have a subscription feature, many sites use this, for example, hotornot does, but I am not sure how they integrate their usernames w/ billing. You'd have to ask them :)

DISCLAIMER: I used to work for clickshare :)

That does sound interesting, but for larger scale check out Clickshare (http://www.clickshare.com). They have quite a robust system that allows payments as low as you want. The system is mostly being used as a way integrate subscription access control and billing without much change to your existing site, but it works fine for article sale and whatnot.

It isn't really a viable solution for places that wouldn't have a total charge to the user of over a few dollars. Basically no Credit Card system would be due to the charges involved from the cc companies. But clickshare can conglomerate a user's charges and only run them every couple of days or say, once a month.

It's quite ingenious, as it allows you to set up pricing tables and such for different pages or sets of pages. Best of all runs on linux or windows servers and requires no client side code or javascript (not sure about cookies).

There is a lot more to clickshare, like allowing sites to sell stuff without having to register users. Also sites that do register users can make money off of their users purchasing at other sites. Check out the website if you are interested. clickshare

Also, Paypal does have a subscription feature, many sites use this, for example, hotornot does, but I am not sure how they integrate their usernames w/ billing. You'd have to ask them :)

DISCLAIMER: I used to work for clickshare :)

There is a company that does per-click billing. It can be either per page or per article. They have been refining the technology for several years. It works, is anonymous, you give them your credit card and the content provider bills through them. You don't need to give the content provider any credit information. In fact you don't need to give them any personal information just your clickshare ID.

Check it out www.clickshare.com

A simple click-through purchase system not requiring users to give up there credit card info (Which could still be stored only on the ISP, if they were brought in to help in that way).

This would be the best solution, the ISP has no way of knowing what the users want, only they know, and only those who want it should pay.

Think about it...

What is lacking is a reliable transaction platform which permits billing for the use of these items on a disaggregated basis across multiple websites.

Napster could work with a mechanism exists for a consumer to click on an MP3 music file at any participating website, and pay for that one song, collecting a set of songs onto a hard-drive and then burning a CD -- the contents of which may consist of songs with royalties owed to 13 or 15 different composers or record labels. Or a consolidating website -- an "infomediary" may wish to bundle a digital product which consists of content resources culled from a dozen other websites.

All that is required is a mechanism for that infomediary website to reliably apportion out the bundled cost of such a product to the underlying producers.

Clickshare's transaction platform for privacy-protected digital-content purchasing envisions this solution. A consumer can have one account at a most-trusted infomediary and purchase content from multiple related websites, paying just one aggregated bill and without having to register over, and over again.

"Micropayments" are a misnomer. Some consumers may want to pay per song. Others may want a subscription or to purchase a collection. The point is to enable all such behaviors, while acknowledging that in the background, there must be a logging mechanism which will sort out the discrete royalty payments to all the constuent content providers.

I don't think anyone will pay for what they can get free, but how long will you be able to get it for free. It isn't the question of if, but when. Have all of you missed the last few months, most everyone who was offering a free service is in one of three situations: gone, charging, or on shaky grounds. There are those who are still doing okay, but they are usually owned by a larger company with an actual revenue model (not to say that some of those free sites don't still have rumors floating about them ,ahem). So if you accept that, then question is how, which vastly affects the how much. If you can set up a system that allows for prices that accurately reflect the worth of the system then it is okay. People are willing to pay, but it has to be worth it. Perhaps this won't happen just yet, while everyone is still basking in the fading glory that is the free internet. But it will happen. I personally work for a company called Clickshare (clickshare.com), we provide a solution that allows content providers to charge a very low minimum, while providing minimal intrusion to the web browsing experience and the web serving maintenace (and production). Don't try to ignore change, you have to except and embrace it, or else it might end up hurting you (aka napster/music industry). just my thoughts (no cash value)