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Micropayments Going Mainstream? Not Yet.
DotEdu writes "Today's NY Times has an interesting article on two new micropayment companies, BitPass and Peppercoin, and the venerable PayPal. More interesting than the companies are the critique: Micropayments are not the silver bullet. You still need to actually have a viable product that you can sell."
Peppercoin is still limited, though, things like music downloads, for instance, don't seem to be viable on their payment scheme. They seem to be mainly concerned with content, such as 'pay .01 cents to see this web page.'
Paypal of course offered their own payment scheme for micropayments as well, but they are limited ONLY to music.
Where I'd personally like to see micropayments is in the services department. You can charge 1.00 per transaction to perform a service, and not get raped by the 33% service charge that forces most of these types of service-oriented businesses to use subscriptions.
It's not stuff in most cases, but intangible goods, like articles, papers, etc. We're not talking about the $5000 IDC papers, but about $.05 John Doe web site selling content. Sometimes the content is even free, but the micropayment is an option to allow users to help keep the site costs down.
I thought of using this on my site Geekzone. The idea of keeping the content free, but being rewarded by happy readers is quite cool. It's being use in on-line comics, e-zines, and sometimes even with tangible goods too.
I have to say that I have Donate Paypal button and some users do act on that - mainly adding messages like "Thanks, your content helped me doing this and that", or "Keep the good work".
This is about knowledge sharing, and helping the people who put these things together and make available.
The micro payments system erodes our privacy. With a cc number connected to micro payment id numer connected to every user id in many websites, a lot of web activity will be recorded on your credit card statement as a summary of what your micro payment bill was. Thus, your isp, micropayment company, and your credit card company (and the govenment via patriot act) could see your activity. If you throw it all into a database, anyone who wants to can infer via datamining all sorts of fun information about you.
First, BitPass uses a pre-paid card model, so there's only one charge on your credit card, the charge for buying the card itself. No individual transactions are listed. Your wife isn't going to know you're looking at micropayment pr0n, if that's what you're afraid of.
Second, the internet has no privacy in the first place. There are IP logs and traffic sniffers galore out there. If you want total privacy, stay off the internet and build yourself a cabin in Montana.
He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.
If you want the site's content enough, you'll pay. If you won't pay, it's obviously not worth that much to you. Economics 101. I have no objection to your choosing either option, but don't pretend that there's something fundamentally wrong with charging a fee for web content or that you deserve to get the content for free despite the author's wishes.