Slashdot Mirror
Whatever Happened to Micropayments?
prostoalex writes "Remember Flooz? Or Beenz? With a few notable successes (PayPal, and that's about it) online micropayment industry is saving its success stories for future generations. New York Times reports about two nascent micropayment systems, one coming out of Stanford, one out of MIT, that are supposed to help the content producers and Internet users to engage in less-than-a-dollar financial transactions without huge overhead costs, so typical of credit card payments. BitPass requires you to purchase a virtual debit card with a certain amount on it to pay for products and services, and PepperCoin consolidates numerous micropayments into one bill that is then split between the content providers that managed to sell their product to the Internet user." I still believe that single penny transactions will revolutionize the net.
I still believe that single penny transactions will revolutionize the net.
/. would allow us to quantify the value of the elusive first post:
Plus, a micropayment system on
320 refreshes waiting for next story
1 hit Reply page
0 hits to preview page (and it shows)
1 hit submit page
75 refreshes to see if FP gets modded down
at $0.01 per Slashdot page hit, an FP would be worth $3.97.
I'm much funnier now that I'm a subscriber.
I'll bet ya $0.000838 that it's not over yet.
Je t'aime Stéphanie
The mere fact that the article reports on two different systems highlights an enormous problem in the world of micropayments: competition creates more problems that it solves! The beauty of a micropayment system is that one doesn't have to keep an account with a single provider, and oftentimes these providers are small enough so that an account would be senseless anyway; the issue created, however, is that consumers moving from one provider to the next are going to need a common ground for payment between them. Although this is what a micropayment service is supposed to be, a flourishing of different micropayment systems will mean consumers will have to stick to one and be limited in where they can spend, or go through the hassle (and probably expense) of creating accounts with many, partially defeating the original purpose. What do I see happening? 1. A single system gains the monopoly, and micropayments start to actually look worthwhile. OR 2. Consumers just continue to resort to big name information providers which they create accounts with, maintaining the status quo. If the e-coins system I was a member of earlier in theis decade is any indication, I see the latter as the much more likely of the two evils to occur...
They were monopolized and price-fixed by ebay, just like online auctions were. Have you looked at the prices for paypal and ebay auctions recently??
--
1-800-759-0700
Call me an old curmudgeon but I think micropayments are just another new way to be (pardon the pun) nickel and dime'd to death. My bank already does it with service charges, my phone company does it with every little "feature", my cell company does it, et al ad nauseum.
The only ones that will PROFIT!!! from this are the big companies pushing it on us.
Trolling is a art,
I wonder when individual music artists will be able to take advantage of better systems like these for distributing their music rather than the major record labels-- at least those who really want to make any profit from anything other than their concerts and merchandise...
KappaStone
Whatever Happened to Micropayments?
I believe they fell through the cracks.
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
Whenever you surf to an advertising-sponsored site you are paying.
I believe the problem with micropayments is the lack of a 'lender of last resort', namely a government backing the scheme. In countries where governments have shown an interest (Finland, Japan,...?) micropayments seem to work just like any other kind of virtual cash.
Certainly there is no technical hurdle to overcome: compared with giving someone your credit card and saying 'I trust you to take what I owe you and no more', and sending them a 'cheque' by email (PayPal) or by SMS (a system I wanted to make), it's clear that a payments system does not have to be perfect to succeed, it just needs backing from banks and government.
Presumably banks are wary of real micropayments because they make so much money from credit cards, the main alternative.
Presumably governments are wary of real micropayments because they see their tax bases being nuked.
I don't see either of these fundamentals changing soon.
PayPal succeeded because they found a niche that was opening at the time, and were were very good, very lucky, to exploit it fully. But without credit cards in the background, PayPal would never have worked.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
The problem with there being competing systems for MicroPayments is that consumers don't want to have multiple accounts (well at least I don't anyway).
Let's say Slashdot joins MicroPayment provider X, and New York Times Online joins MicroPayment provider Y, I need to have accounts with X and Y if those 2 websites happen to be in my favourites.
Interoperability needs to be sorted out right up front; otherwise no one company will be successful.
The obvious players are Visa and Mastercard. I suspect that they are just treading water until there is a whiff of possible competition, at which point they will swoop in together make MicroPayments happen between them.
The stupid names. "Flooz"? "Beenz"? And I'm not thrilled with "PepperCoin," either.
Paypal also had a lot of marketting muscle and a catchy name.
To top this off, Paypal also started to guaranty their purchases.
It also ended up being the way that Paypal was used for other payment services because of the debit card that allowed it to prosper. I would for instance use my Paypal card to pay Billpoint or PayDirect if it was offered. This would get me 1.5% back.
StormPay and C2it are the services frauds use. Bidpay is reasonable, but never use it to pay for anything just to be paid.
The author misses Paydirect, which controls Yahoo payments. This is a decent service and is in some ways a superior "eshopping cart" service. Many small websites or discount hardware websites use Yahoo stores and the PayDirect service.
I do agree with the author that "penny payments will revolutionize the internet though" - I see the internet broadband/wifi/otherwise being free in most cases within 10 years. I see ISPs as selling "credit cards" rather than subscriptions. These cards would allow you to send and receive email and view websites. The ISPs in turn act as a bank for websites such as Slashdot. Paying them for the number of views that have crossed their service say 1/100th of a cent for every page view.
I think email should cost 1 cent to send, 1 cent to receive. I think it should be 1 penny each page/email view or bulk 1000/100MB /views for $1 -- 10,000/ MB/ views $10 -- 100,000/MB / views $50 - therefore sites that want to remain free can, sites that want to charge can almost transparently.
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
What worked best was simply putting an inexpensive yearly fee in place. People pay once and can forget about worrying about any recurring charges or running up some kind of tab that will only come back and surprise them later.
After a year, more than half of them renew their accounts too. And just so they can have access to a giant database of humorous, strange, and twisted photos and media files. Go figure ...
Disaffected youth #1: I still believe that single penny transactions will revolutionize the net.
Disaffected youth #2: Are you being sarcastic, dude?
Disaffected youth #1: [dejectedly] I don't even know anymore.
Just make sure you put the decimal point in the corect place. You don't want to end up in a Federal Pound-Me-In-The-Ass prison.
Governments are supposed to be responcible for maintaining a robust and useful currency system. Supplying a robust currency system should be a slam dunk, no brainer extension of the current monetary system. Online, government secured currency is what is needed.
One of the reasons a 3 cent transaction is doable is that there is not a business making the transaction unworkable by adding a fee. The voter is once again uncouncious, failing to force government to live up to its obligations.
HenryJamesFeltus.com
I know that somebody always mentions Apple in /. stories nowadays, but does anyone know how they overcame the micropayment issue with their iTunes Music Store? I would think that some lessons could be gleaned from their experience with it.
Slashdot's first reaction to VMware
Xanadu was the first system for reverse linkable, micropayment ready, Super-HTML system.
.0002 cents for accesses to debian mirrors? I certainly would IF IT WAS EASY.
It was set up originally to help content manufacturers so they could choose how much to reimburse their goods with. You could choose free, if you wanted.
Bandwidth still costs no matter what, so this could at least pay for bandwidth. And who WOULDNT pay
Xanadu also provided for searchable media: An mpeg movie is linked from IMBD to a section of frame 23508-24003 on the movie servers. The content people then would access a porportinate cost to that snippet. Who wouldnt agree to pay 4cents for that access?
And now for those whining that that network wouldnt be "All Pay", if you create content, you can get money too. It's like a payment counter that goes both ways rapidly.
Instead the HTML One-Way links, dead links, leeches, and no accountability system started. And it started ONLY because Xanadu was closed, secret system then (80's-early 90's), and HTTP/HTML was Public, known system.
If we are going to have the concept of micro-payments, why can't we have micro-content providers?
I regularly post to Slashdot. I am essentially a micro-content provider to Slashdot. I have posted over 800 comments, many of them high Karma scorers. If I made, say, one cent per Karma point, then I would be about 30 dollars better off by now! Woohoo!
I've started leaving the spare change when I buy little stuff like coffee, takeout food, and trinkets at small shops. Imagine what would happen to the economy if everybody left their 37 cents after buying coffe? The people working minimum-wage at the coffee shops would be making over $30/hour! I think 'micropayments' in real life (not online) could seriously revolutionize the economy, it would finally give the poorest amongst us the ability to make decent (and tax-free) earnings.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
Taco, if you really believe that, then Slashdot is the place to launch TacoBeans the new micropayment solution from OSDN. Seriously.
If you don't really believe it, why did you say it ?
--- These are not words: wierd, genious, rediculous
Most micropayment companies have failed in the past for two reasons:
1) They debuted at the height of the dotcom craze, when advertising money, venture capital, and ludicrous business plans were everywhere. Back then, users were getting so much of their online experience subsidized by these factors that micropayments weren't attractive to them. Now, in the depressed post-boom environment, micropayments are becoming attractive to consumers again.
2) Most micropayment companies focused on the wrong markets. Micropayment companies have traditionally focused on large content providers, trying to get already successful businesses to change their business model to something their consumers were skeptical or even resentful of. BitPass, however, has instead focused on a bottom-up approach, marketing to individual content producers like webcomics creators, artists, and musicians, who haven't been able to charge what their work was worth until now. I think this is going to be the deciding factor in their success.
I'm working on a BitPass user group site to help the BitPass community grow. If you're curious, I'll post to my journal when the site is up.
He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.
I've been saying it for years, and I continue to be right. Micropayments don't solve a customer problem, they solve a provider problem. If you don't solve a customer problem, you don't have a success. Nobody wants to be nickle and dimed to death on the net. It's time to retire this monumentally dumb idea.
The amount of time, effort and money poured down this rathole is really sad.
And the answer is, they will *never* happen. read all about it here. In that article, Clay says so much, so perfectly, that I won't quote any of it--just go and read the whole thing. OK, I can't resist. One of his points is micropayments have too much "user overhead"--you have to make a descision for literally every penny you spend, and that alone makes it not worth it. As he says, the user is getting conflicting messages: "This is worth so much you have to decide whether to buy it or not" and "This is worth so little that it has virtually no cost to you."
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Once a micropayment company becomes really successful, Paypal will buy them out, and integrate their services with Paypal's. This will make them the de facto standard on the Internet, and the other micropayment companies will die.
Until you can convince consumers and possibly their service providers to accept micropayments, you might as well employ trained chimpanzees to do the actual processing.
Ugh. Micropayments were a bad idea back in the dot-com days where they were concieved, and they're still a bad idea today. People won't visit sites where they are going to be (literally) nickel-and-dimed to death. People don't want yet another financial account to keep track of, yet another critical login to remember.
Even if one of these schemes manages to attract an appreciable following, large enough to be noticed by the credit card companies, then what? All it would take is a simple policy change to put them out of business. Maybe $50 gets unlimited sub-$5.00 transactions per month, or something like that. The whole micropayment concept is necessitated by the desire to avoid high transaction fees on credit card payments. Once the credit card companies wake up and provide a plan tailored for the smaller retailer, the entire micropayment industry disappers. Perhaps it will take a micropayment company that looks like it is on the verge of real success to do it, but as soon as they attract the attention of the big boys, they will be wiped out, pretty much overnight.
Any business that can be invalidated by a policy change by a larger, competing institution is not, in the long term, viable.
The big problem for micropayments is this: Are they automatic?
If people have to take deliberate action to spend a penny, it's not going to work; at $7.20/hour, if it takes them five seconds to read and respond to a prompt, they've spent more in their time than the penny they're paying.
However, if the payments are made automatic, a different problem takes over: People aren't culturally ready for having their money spent, by a computer, on their behalf. Never mind that every time their thermostat turns on, it's spending their money -- that's sufficiently hidden from the users.
The only way I can see micropayments becoming mainstream is if they are refundable within a given time limit -- but that would only work if people don't start "charging back" all their payments.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
I hereby declare the following idea mine: what if you just charged micropayments, and it worked? Suppose that it costs 3 cents to process a 1 cent transaction, but if you're doing 80 billion transactions a month, you don't care because:
1) one day, people will find a way to make it profitable, and
2) when that day comes, you'll already own the market & make back everything you lost.
Just do business & wait for technology to catch up. There's too much fussing about whether or not it would be profitable from the get-go.
stuff |
They would have to agree to an expense account for buying Karma. I'm not cutting into my profits for a few extra points when... I've probably said too much.
Slashdotter are stupid and biased.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
To summarize, when the cost of clicking a link is only time (how long will it take to load that link on my 28.8 modem), its a relatively simple decision. When its both time and money, a judgement has to be made. Sure, for a penny a page, one might not worry about it, but nobody's going to make money on a penny a page, no matter what "they" say; that only works on click-rates the size of CNN, MSNBC, Slashdot, source-forge, etc. And even then, when they see "the bill", it'll be like getting their first credit card bill and having no idea just how much they "spent" online...then they'll be reconsidering each and every link and users don't want to do that.
Users surf or they don't. If you had to pay a per-minute charge for doing real surfing in the pacific ocean, you wouldn't surf, so (extending the metaphore) why would you do it at home? There's a reason AOL and all the other ISPs got rid of their traditional per-minute charges and people buy cell phone and long-distance plans with max minutes instead of per-minute charging; the variable at the end of the month isn't worth the hassle.
"But remember, most lynch mobs aren't this nice." (H.Simpson)
-- Joe
Let's look at some real-world examples:
- Take-a-penny trays
- All-you-can-eat buffets
- Free refills on non-alcholic drinks everywhere
- 6 packs, 12 packs, 24 packs (you don't just buy only as many bottles/cans as you want)
- Unlimited local calls on home phones
- 600-minute & 1200-minute cell phone plans
Maybe these aren't all completely relevant, but I just don't see paying a little bit for each click being of value to consumers. I see it as being a huge pain in the rear, even if it is all automated and trusted. (cough, Paypal, cough)I think the real problem is that much of the internet's content just isn't worth any money to us. We can get a lot of content for 50 cents per day from the local newspaper. We can get content faster from TV at no incremental cost (but arguably less convenience). The internet can be great, but I ain't paying for Slashdot. The Motley Fool already lost me when they went subscription; they just aren't worth it.
If most everything interesting went pay I think there would be enough people volunteering news/info sites and discussion boards that we could still get our free internet. We may have to move to a p2p distribution model since running a centralized site as busy as Slashdot, for example, costs a pretty penny in bandwidth.
http://www.openp2p.com/pub/a/p2p/2000/12/19/microp ayments.html
Rich.
libguestfs - tools for accessing and modifying virtual machine disk images
E-gold works wonders. Pay any weight of gold, silver, platinum or palladium, all backed in real life by metal. You own the real metal and a payment is just a transfer of ownership. You don't even have to pay by weight, you can say $100USD worth of e-gold.
Been running for years, working really well, the only thing is the slow adoption rate and the fees. When (or if) this reaches critical mass it will be the best of all the options.
This is how i pay for my hosting and brought my domain name, not no mention a few other things.
Remember, it takes 42 muscles to frown and only 4 to pull the trigger of a sniper rifle.
The only people crying for micropayments are websites that produce "content" that's nearly worthless. If the content is worth something, people will make macropayments to subscribe. If the content is essentially worthless, consumers are not going to push to be charged an amount so small that they don't notice it until the end of the month, and deal with the password, account, and billing hassle of playing along.
If you're going to do that, you may as well tack on an ISP tax and create national grants for the weblog arts. It could be like all those cryptic fees tacked on to my phone bill that constitute half my monthly payment.
Oddly enough, it seems that the free market folks are the ones who insist most strongly that this has to exist. I think the market has spoken on micropayments.
The big problem with Shirky's analysis is that he makes no distinction between payments of, say, half a cent, and payments of a dollar or more. And that's a major flaw in his argument.
In the real world, Shirky's argument translates to: "No one will buy a candy bar for 50 cents because they will be paralyzed by the user overhead." And, of course, we know this wrong. The candy industry (just to give an example) makes millions of dollars of profit a year selling 50 cent candy bars.
Likewise, there is a legitimate zone of value for digital content that falls between a dime and a couple bucks. 50 cents for an online comic you like, or for a song from a band you want to support, isn't any different than 50 cents for a candy bar.
Micropayments are just payments. And I think it'll be funny if, in a couple years, the artists and writers and bands who are making money off of micropayments can read Clay's article and have a good laugh.
He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.
I've been wondering about this since it opened... and I haven't had my account long enough to find out for myself. Maybe $0.99 isn't a micropayment, but it certainly is a minipayment.
I've been hearing for years that the cost of handling credit card payments makes it impractical to use it for purchases of less than about $10. So how does Apple do this?
Certainly a big appeal of the Music Store is that you pay only for what you use and are NOT saddled with an automatic $5.95 or $8.95 per month.
Do they batch them? Do they actually lose money on someone who only buys one song a month, and gamble that most users will buy more than that?
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
The New York State EZ-Pass toll transponder system, and probably many others, may not be a "micropayment" system but certainly occupies some kind of middle ground. They initially bill your credit card $15, which establishes $15 in your EZ-Pass account. Toll payments of $0.65, $1.15, etc. gradually reduce the amount; when the amount gets low, they hit your credit card automatically for another $15 "recharge."
So perhaps one of the things that's happening with micropayments is that these "credit card auto-recharge" accounts are serving some of the functions for which micropayments would otherwise be needed.
I'm not quite sure what happens when you terminate your EZ-Pass account; I assume they send you a check for $6.22 or whatever. I suppose that if I had thirty or forty of these accounts, it might get to be annoying having $500 or $1000 tied up in tiny, non-interest bearing, spendable-for-only-a-single-purpose accounts.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
I am a seller on BITPASS.
I think its great. I sell my stories and novels there for a dime or more. I have been doing it for a week, and already have had an amazing amount of sales.
Seems to work for me, when nothing else I have tried ever worked before.
Forget the honor system or begging for donations. Micropayments just works.
Roger Born
Writer, Teacher, General Troublemaker
rogerborngraphics.com
On the one hand, there's a faction trying to eliminate the penny in the US because it's nearly worthless (nothing costs <$0.05 anymore). On the other hand, people are trying to figure out how to charge micropayments on the net. Aren't these opposite approaches to the same problem?
It seems to me that when a commodity gets cheap enough, people are willing to pay a flat fee for nearly unlimited usage. The most obvious example is phone service. Do you think people will ever really want to spend their money in tiny increments? I don't.
At my local(San Diego) kinkos I can use a credit card at the copier. You simply insert the card in the card reader and make the copies. I recently made 60cents worth of purchases and when I got my bill(AMEX)it was truly 60cents. Obviously kinkos has worked something out with the major card companies or they are just eating the fees on low end purchases.
On the good part: the control of the contents is in the hands of the clients, not the sponsors. Better content will win. They liberate us of the danger of bad subscriptions... lots of times one can tell whether the site sucks or not in a couple of clicks, and what now would be a US$20 subscription could be a couple of micropayments. They also would liberate us of the "subscriber-only" links that appear around here :)
But: nice to see how you manage to get the transaction overhead below the US$0.01, although this can be done with "virtual credit accounts". And while supporters can argue that we already use micropayments, like for water and electricity, there's a little detail that gets no airtime: most of the things that work on micropayments are monopolies or cartels. Remember dial-up internet? Pay as you use? Once flat-fee came into the block, pay per use went out fast... as the flat-fee guy rakes in the money.
Other issue that can be seen with micropaymentes is the fact that they clutter our surfing experience. There is, your previously unencumbered surfing now is awash with little transactions. Plus the confusion factor: the idea is to embed the micropayments into the links, so that it is automatic. So, you have this link that a) has you assess if it's worth to click that link and at the same time b) tells you it costs so little that it's nothing.
This working scheme that tries to save everything *but* the user's time doesn't sound so hot to me. Add to that de aggregation/disaggregation of products: is the newspaper worth a buck? is each article worth five cents? and so on... the pricing isn't clear anymore, when you had your newspaper for a dollar.
So, in my opinion, while having control of content in the hands of the customers and getting rid of subscriptions is fine, I think there's a lot to be fixed in the current schema of micropayments...
billing has always been a Big Deal for them, and they have been adapting to customer demand for flat rate in some cases (but not all).
bell labs used to employ economists and psychologists and periodically re-addressed the issues of billing.
TPC managements have been clueless about the internet from the beginning, though. quite a shame.
micropayments aren't going to fly, unless there's a cross-vendor api that allows me to choose my own micropayment gateway and not be limited to only -their- micropayment customers. and that isn't likely unless the treasury gets involved. (you can give me a call at my mars cottage when they get around to that)
what content sites -should- do instead, is let people charge up a site-specific 'meter', with say, $5. and as they view content, you deduct micropayments from the script total. when they hit 0, you either bring the ads back for that user or prompt em for more dough.
alternately, sites could just use the street performer protocol. seems to work just fine for every worthy webcomic to date. if not enough people buy t-shirts and prints and collectibles, you close up shop and go somewhere else, or try again (perhaps in a different format).
no need for pvp or penny-arcade or homestarrunner to go to micropayments. sites less dedicated to merchandising can stick with metered subscriptions. everyone wins. (except the micropayment banks)
its just easier for everyone involved if you ask me. plus, there's no additional costs/worries/security issues that you'd get with micropayment banks charging fees, going under, getting hacked, etc, etc, etc
// "Can't clowns and pirates just -try- to get along?"
When you contest payment with your bank, what happens? Well, you talk to an actual live human being, who will do actual human things, and make a decision on whether to refund you the money and whether to prosecute a third party. And your transaction fees pay his salary.
What happens when you contest something with PayPal? You drop them an email (good luck trying to talk to anyone), and then they freeze your account, sieze (i.e. spend) your money, and (if they're feeling particularly communicative) tell you to go screw yourself. They do that not because they're evil (although they probably are) but because they simply don't make enough margin on their transactions to be able to afford to investigate them, and because they know that it's not worth anyone's time to sue them, even in small claims court, for the contested amounts.
Now, when the transaction value drops to 1 cent, what's the best case margin on that? You've got purchase and maintenance costs on your servers and database, plus bandwidth costs for those 128bit SSL encrypted transaction details that fly both ways. Half a cent? More if you handle a lot. A loss if you don't handle enough to amortize your setup costs.
Now, how many fraudulent transactions do you have to have - from a single source - before it's worth taking any action? It costs ten cents for a staffer to click on a button, so you're talking twenty transactions. If the staffer has to think at all, it's a hundred. If they have to do any investigatation at all - for example, to decide if a bunch of transactions are from a single source - it's thousands. If you want to hand it over to a lawyer or other third party, it's tens or hundreds of thousands.
But that's fantasy land, because it's not worth even recording the details of the transaction that would allow you to decide if it was fraudulent or not. The logs themslves would take a huge chunk out of your profit. You'd simply have to trust the referrer.
Well, that's not working out too well for credit cards right now, but at least cc issuers can pass back all the costs to online retailers for credit card fraud.
But if it's not worth your while even retaining transaction records for micropayments, or to investigate fraud after the fact, how are you going to protect themselves from fraud?
I suspect that you're not. It comes down to the equation of whether it's worth anyone's time to crack the system. Well, as thousands of open source projects, white hat hobbyist hackers, and karma systems show, lots of people don't put a dollar value on their time. And given that the chances of being caught are minimal, well, why not give it a go? After all, it's only avoiding a penny a time. Who can that hurt?
Any popular micropayment system will (I suggest) be defrauded, and the costs will come right out of the payment backer's pocket. We've seen how PayPal deals with that; ignore it. Don't answer the 'phones. Freeze the account, and spend the money in it. With micropayments, who's going to even bother complaining? And if they do, how much are they going to have in their account? $5? It's barely even worthwhile seizing that, and not worthwhile at all if you have to send or even read a letter.
There is simply no compelling reason for anyone to manage micropayments, other than as a tool of desperation to prop up a flagging or non-existent business model (*cough* slashdot *cough*). There's precious little profit to be made from it, and a lot of opportunity to be scammed so badly that you won't even realise that you're bankrupt until you total the figures at the end of the year and find out that most of your payments came from Mr M. Mouse.
I suspect that it's good old fashioned economics that are stopping any of the big financial institutions from implementing mi
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
don't make me figure out prices and charge me for access, just let me set up a monthly account and easily give a tip if i like something. i.e. you put a "tip the author of this" selection under the right mousebutton/click n' hold menu. bonus points for making it work it work for mp3s, pdfs, web pages, /. posts or even listserv posts.
http://usprogressives.org/ - redesign democracy.
I run a medium-sized content website. I get between 4 and 5 million pageviews per month, about 10,000 unique visitors per day, and about 180,000 unique visitors per month.
I've figured out that if I could get each unique visitor to pay me just a nickel -- 5 cents -- per month, I could take down the banner advertising, quit my day job, and work on my site full time (and therefore make it that much better with more information).
Think about it. What if you had to pay content sites just $0.05 per month to access the content? Most internet users visit perhaps at most 100-200 different content sites per month. That would add just $10 to your monthly bill, and all advertising could be eliminated.
I would think that sites that are successful in selling you things -- like Amazon -- wouldn't charge you to enter, so that may even cut down on the number of sites you have to pay for each month.
With a price point of just $0.05, you wouldn't have to think to yourself, "gee, should I click on this link, do I really want to spend the money"?
I've tried various forms of banner advertising, sponsorships, commission links, etc., but I still can't earn close to $0.05 (on average) from each visitor (I'm at about $0.003 per unique).
I don't want to make my site into subcription-based, I'd rather keep it free, or free enough so that people could still easily view it.
Face it, the content on the internet has slowed down a lot since the dot-bomb. That's a direct result of there being no money in content publishing. It's closing up even further; one by one sites are becoming subscription-only. Pretty soon the internet is going to be one big magazine rack with the magazines all shrink-wrapped, and just a few free-zines in the corner.
Simply giving web publishers a few table scraps each month would dramatically revitalize what was once a very promising source of content and entertainment. Micropayemnts are one of the few ways that this can happen.
It is not so much the absurd notion that everything on the net is free, it is the simple fact that whatever your are about to access and pay a micropayment for, is more then likely available free somewhere else. This is why micropayments are failing. It would take a cartel of thousands of members in a common field working together to get a critical mass before micropayments will go anywhere, or a very specific niche location. Cell phone ringer sites are a textook example. There are pay-for play but there are tons of free ones also. The users paying are doing so because they do not know about the free ones, or they like the content on certain pay sites. If you run a pay site, you better hope it offers something unique because most people will eventually find the free ones.
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
Instead the HTML One-Way links, dead links, leeches, and no accountability system started. And it started ONLY because Xanadu was closed, secret system then (80's-early 90's), and HTTP/HTML was Public, known system.
AND because the people with the management's ear "rabidly prototyped" rather than designing and staying focussed on getting a product out, and pushed aside those in the project who asked them hard questions.
So they pushed the problems around from module to module rather than solving them. And they gave a presentation to the backers about "throway code" and how you only keep about 5-10% of the code in each pass through the loop. And this inability to undestand that a product is supposed to come out after a couple passes ("Q", not "O") ticked off their backers, who eventually backed out and left them back in the garage.
Xanadu had some good solutions - which is good, because they were trying to solve ALL the problems at once. But its "architects" never picked one and settled on it, so the rest of the crew could actually work on it (and not see their work discarded before it could even be finished).
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Most of my transactions are bigger than micro but not all.
Anyway to show one good use of micropayments I will pay the first 10 people to mod me up, advise me of your e-gold account number (and if you have 1mdc the initials for the account), allow me time to pay you, I am working and on the road.
Here is a freebie to get you started...
I have another interest in anonymous money, but that is another subject, if interested google should show my interests or if your even slacker, email me.
This is my sig, exciting huh!