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A Viable System for Micropayments?
KalvinB asks: "According to The Case for Micropayments, Nielson makes the case that subscriptions fence you in because you either pay nothing and get nothing or pay a large fee. I'm curious as to why a large fee is the only option. Perhaps in 1998 bandwidth was as expensive as gold but five years later I propose A Viable System for Micropayments and how to implement it. The cost can easily be calculated either arbitrarily or by determining the amount of bandwidth the average user uses per month or year. I'm curious as to how viable you think this system is and if you have any ideas for improvement. Mainly in calculating cost and accepting payments. I think the biggest obstacle to micropayments is a complete misunderstanding of the term 'micro.' In the article it's talking about paying several dollars per page at some sites. By my calculations that file better be 5GB or more. It's greed, I think more than anything, that's limiting it's acceptance. Sites don't want to charge a reasonable fee and people think their ISP bill is an all access pass to the Internet. The idea of actually paying for products they use and paying more than the product was produced for is suddenly lost when they go online."
I currently pay for the use of FilePlanets exclusive servers. They charge 6.95 a month (less than the cost of a movie, or 2 video game rentals) and you get access to 100+k/s downloads. You can, however, use their public servers and wait in line for free.
Gamespot also offers members only access, as well as free parts to their sites.
When sites offer stuff I am willing to pay for, I will pay for it. However, we're not charged (usually) for browsing at a brick and mortar store, so why should we be charged for browsing through a web page of the same content?
In other words, if you are offering a service online, and you feel that I need to pay to use that, by all means charge me something fair (anything over 2-3 dollars a month for simple browsing is rediculous), but remember, most people are only going to pay for a few sites a month if we're using a pay to browse system, and most will go looking for the same thing on a free site, and you lose a customer.
After all, gamespot and IGN offer basically the same stuff, yet everytime I go to IGN they want me to pay, and as a result, I do not browse there.
Thats my rant, YMMV.
This is my sig. Its pathetic.
I don't think paypal should really be used for the micropayment side. I am skeptical of using paypal for anything anymore considering their policies. They are not considered a bank and can get away with things that a bank is required by law to prevent. There are cases of fraud with paypal that caused problems since there are no rules of what paypal should be responsible for. Until there are more protections in place, I think another method would work for micropayments.
-- Wolfpup
"A man whose circumstances went beyond his control." -- Styx
I run a couple of information sites. I found that selling a product releated to the information helps defray my costs. I haven't gotten where I can support my family and myself, but I do have a nice set of co-located servers and it helps pay for Christmas as well.
-- Many men would appreciate a woman's mind more if they could fondle it
This is just subscriptions. But the author thinks people don't like paying subscriptions, so he decided to call his subscription a micropayment-equivalent.
From a large corporation, I'd call this scummy and dishonest. From a person, I'll simply call it dishonest.
The point with micropayments is that I can visit a pay site once in a year, and only pay 3cents for that individual visit. (With, of course, a transaciton cost of about $2 on that 3cent bill.)
KalvinB's system is good only for long-term site users. Which admittedly is what a site wants, but it would be nice if he were honest enough to say that's what he's doing.
I will admit, the idea of subscriptions that only pay bandwidth costs is a reasonable thing to do. But it isn't a replacement for advertisements. It is a companion to them, to make the advertiser willing to pay more. You have the same deal with a subscription to newspapers... Your cost for a subscription to the New York Times or Washington Post just about covers the raw costs for the paper - the processed wood pulp - only. All other costs of running the business - salaries, equipment, general overhead - are paid by advertising.
You are paying for the privelege of allowing the paper to sell access to "people that are willing to spend money" while yourself getting access to good quality news coverage.
If you get something that's worthwhile to you, that's fine. But don't think KalvinB's thing has anything to do with micropayments.
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is... Oops. Frank, I've got your sig again! Where's mine?
The only place that I might be enticed to micropay for anything is compelling content, especially knowing that money is going into the hand of the aritst/writer/creator that provides it, and the payment is reasobable.
But paying for the amount of bandwith I use? Perposterous! We already pay way to much for broadband access as it is, and most of us have had our bandwitdth seriously capped in the last year. And in large part this expensive capped service exists because we lacks serious competition in broadband.
Compare our prices to Asia and it will make you weep:
Japan: $11/month gets you 11 megabits/sec
Korea: $25/month gets you 100 megabits/sec!
And these are flat rates!
**The capacity and growth of actual bandwith has far exceeded the exponential of processor speed. The current pricing structure in the US is Greed, pure and simple from Dinosaurs trying to hold onto power by enforcing artificial scarcity.
I highly recomment everyone read Support Telcoms Fast Failure
Planet P Blog - Liberty with Technology.
www.enthea.org
It talks about more than just technical reasons why to (or not to) use micropayments...
A friend of mine owned a store a while back, and I once asked him why he wouldn't accept credit cards for some purchases. Basically, it costs the vendor money to process a credit card. In his case, he wouldn't take a card for a purchase under $10 because the processing fee ate up too much of his already thin margin, nd it was still uncomfortable for him to do so for purchases under $20.
That right there is the barrier that is preventing micropayments from working. You aren't going to charge me $.03 to look at a page when it costs you $.50 to process the transaction, and I'm not going to pay $.53 just to view one stinking page.
The only way I see micropayments working is someone like Visa buys into it and restructures fees to make micropayments viable, and I don't see that happening any time soon.
Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
Important questions unasked:
* A system for refunds
There are none currently but the easy way is that if your account is completely unused you can get your money back minus the fees incured by the payment system. You'd get 4.55 back in my case. If you use your account then no, of course you're not getting a refund. Otherwise people would sign up, grab what they want, and demand a refund.
* A system for letting people reload pages
keywords "unlimited access" It's not asked because it's not an issue when you don't care how much or how little is accessed.
* A way to get people to trust your payment system (i.e. what if I pay my $10 and you go out of business)
Terms of Service. I've been around for 2 years and can afford to keep the site running indefinitly as it is now.
* The cost of doing this business
Nothing out of pocket. That's answered by the fact that through out the entire article I never mention something you have to pay out of pocket and at the end is "that's all you need." So yes, if you read the article you get the answer to that question.
* Dealing with forgeries
The auditing system. And I mention in the article how to kill off accounts if there are any issues. People will always try to find a way to fool you and well, that's business. It's not possible to go through all the ways people will try to steal and how to counter them.
So yes, those questions were mostly answered in the article. It's just not in "question answer" form yet.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
"None of that is covered here, and that's what's needed in order to have a viable micropayment system"
.htaccess. At least use those same controls to limit access to the crazily-named one.
.htaccess on a windows system is a bitch to edit. That's why I changed the name and hid it.
I acknowledge the problem. The solution to payments is a lump sum of micropayments. The solution to the social problem doesn't exactly have a short article solution now does it?
- Why change the name of the htaccess file? Apache by default makes sure that nobody can download a file called
A file named
- It's a really bad idea to use Visual Basic's deterministic Rnd function to generate passwords. (!)
If you want to run through all the possibilities of RND in 7 letter combinations be my guest. It's going to take a lot of tries to get one right and the password will be changed long before you succeed. And you'll be reported to your ISP.
- It's easy to use xcmd or bash or perl to make htpasswd read from a file, just like his program does.
I shouldn't have to use a command prompt for something so simple.
I know C and I had access to the C source for htpasswd. That's why I did it my way. There are dozens of solutions for every problem. It's kind of lame because I chose one that you don't think was the best.
- No programs around that analyze apache logs?? Holy crap, are you serious??
They suck for what I want to do. I looked. The only one I found that does okay is Analog but the output isn't what I want and all goes into a single file which is rediculous. Again, my solution works best for my needs. You can't very well bitch because I chose one you didn't.
Ben
Work Safe Porn