Slashdot Mirror
The March Towards Micropayments
MattW writes "It's been well over a year since Ron Rivest's company Peppercoin was introduced on Slashdot. Now, the AP is reporting that Peppercoin 2.0 is here. Peppercoin's website indicates that version 2.0 pays merchants exactly what they charged, instead of with cryptographically signed tokens which may or may not sum out to exactly the expected charges. This looks like the technology that will enable credit card acceptance in vending machines and video games, but may not solve the need for truly "micro" payments, like paying $.005 for a page view."
The biggest obstacle to using credit cards for micropayments is the cost of transaction processing
I wonder if the folks at Microsoft are considering Passport as a micropayment vehicle for subscription-based websites? Micropayments lower the threshold and do not require a big decision before users get their initial benefits: thus users will be encouraged to view more pages and spend more. Of course, there will almost certainly be discount schemes for frequent users of a site such that nobody would end up paying more than they would under a subscription plan.
Also, although a closed initative, the W3C Micropayments Working Group provides some interesting info.
Sigs cause cancer.
Seriously, pay-per-vid might be something that could take hold.
Plus, a click is one thing, but when someone PAYS for a clickthrough to watch, then the tracking can be better recorded.
Don't we usualy see the Pr0n ind. testing out stuff like this early on anywayz?
Might happen..
i could see this working if prepaid low limit debit cards became common. I would love to use prepaid $100 cards to pay for stuff online just for the added safty. You can't have your credit rating messed with if your not risking it. Plus it would make micropayments not a big deal. You could keep a $10 or $20 card handy just for that purpose.
Many gambling websites such as http://www.onlinegambling.com/ and http://www.partypoker.com/ allow users to gamble using credit and debit cards. They also provide other methods of payment such as paypal - which uses a savings/checking/credit card account anyways. The online gambling industry is thriving.
I think micropayments would work very well for people who want to download music, do research, or gain the benefits of some other inexpensive transaction.
http://tomgould.com/
My boss has talked a bit about trying to find a way to make some small amounts of money coming in constantly through micro payments... the only problem is, what could you truely market to make people pay micropayments for?
When I go to a site and they want me to pay to see content, even if a small amount, I always go elsewhere because (a)I font want to go through a hassle of paying to see a damn site and (b) I doubt right away that whatever lies within isn't worth my dollars.
One idea my boss had was perhaps people could come to a site and find a simular question they have, and pay to see the answer. I also fail to see how this would work either, as a little googling usually reveals the answer to any technical question I have. I dunno though, seems alot of people are always asking questions on irc without even trying google.... like they say:
"Give a man a fish, he'll eat for a day, but tell him to RTFM and he'll keep asking questions!"
DOMAI has been doing this for a long time now.
Granted, it's not quite porn, it fits the bill...
indeed...part b of your argument is actually used by a harvard business school prof to argue against the RIAA's claim that free music piracy hurts sales. as is said in the article, many online sites appeal to groups that are "money-poor but time-rich." indeed slashdot fits the bill.
unfortunate, because I think roads should be toll based. and I think that if I was a guy whose only passion is drawing comics, I'd rather get paid a little less by everyone than have to take the time to do some marketing.
What people don't realize, thay pay for internet twice. Most of the people pay subscription fees to ISPs, on the other end, people who provide the content forced to pay for web hosting. What is really bizzare is that the more popular your web site is, (i.e. more people go online to browse it, and consequently produce higher revenues for ISPs) the more you pay for the traffic to your web site.
In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is. - Yogi Berra
1. Implement transparent micropayment on site.
2. Submit article to Slashdot concerning random article on site.
3. ???
4. Profit!
When traffic alone generates revenue nobody need care about selling a product or providing content. Just dupe as many people as possible into viewing a page. We're seeing this small-scale with affiliate programs, I predict we'll see much more of this before it's all over.
Whose need? Certainly not mine. Most web pages I visit should be glad they got a hit, much less my nickel. Say goodbye to "surfing" when everyone realizes they can charge-- I'm not going to pay to browse unknown sites.
Something else that hasn't been mentioned, you can also say goodbye to any semblance of anonymity when your credit card company keeps an enormous tally of every page you paid five cents to visit. And of course, they won't use that info. for market research, will they?
A large part of MasterCard's transaction cost is the risk that the buyer will challenge the charge and MasterCard will have to arbitrate, and in the worst case, absorb the cost. That risk is much smaller for tiny transactions, both because they're smaller amounts and because nobody would bother to challenge them.
Anyone know how well slashdot does with micropayments?
http://www.windmeadow.com/
If you think your content isn't worth changing a worthwhile amount of money ($1.00 or more) for then you should just put up ads (AdSense). Or if you just don't want to charge visitors for access. Nothing is worth the hassle of doing an electronic transaction for a few pennies. Google AdSense is built for doing very small transactions and it requires no work on the visitors part except to be interested enough in an ad to click thru.
I'm not going to go to a web-site and whip out my credit card just to spend a few pennies. The effort isn't worth the "reward." But if an ad is interesting enough and the site isn't vomiting ads in my face I won't hesitate to click on the ad. They get their "micropayment" with no hassle on anybody's part.
Content owners need to take a hint from Costco et al and sell in bulk. Digital Blasphemy charges for access to some of their new material and access to the archive.
Charging per comic or per page is just silly. Would you pay a penny for a single page out of a book? Have the most recent X days of strips free and charge for access to older strips. That gives visitors the ability to get a good idea if your work is of any quality and the fans the ability to support the author in a reasonable fashion.
Someone needs to take this micopayment horse out to pasture and put it out of its misery. The only people making money on this scheme are the people who come up with these cheesy products that alledgedly handle micropayments.
Ben
Work Safe Porn
I can't believe they patented this.
I think that parts of Amazon's loathesome "1-click" ordering is actually prior art. If you have 1-click turned on, it will not process your order for a couple of minutes. This allows you to order several items - one after the other - and they will be combined into a single order. This way you only pay for credit card overhead and shipping on the entire order (and not for overhead & shipping on each individual item).
I think the 1-click patent is absolutely worthless in the first place - a patent on combining transactions, doubly so.
Other uses for the method are in network transactions - specifically Doom 1.0 -> Doom 1.1 update back in 1992 (or 1993?). Doom 1.0 sent tiny packets (sometimes one packet per *bullet*) and was known for choking networks because of the overhead. The update combined tiny packets into larger ones so that the overhead was less. This is a logically identical technique, just applied to data rather than money.
Perhaps that's the very thing that micropayments would spur on. If everything could be reduced to micro-payments, perhaps most people would opt to pay some sort of flat-fee for access.
The real Houdini move there would be in getting people to forget that they didn't want to pay for the content in the first place by having a payment scheme twice removed (!).
You'd rather something be free than available for micropayments. But, with the choice between flat-rate and micropayments, sheeple would probably want flat rate and *feel* it is better than the micropayments: "Ahhh... look at all this content I get for a FLAT RATE! Those bastards are getting screwed and don't even know it!" Indeed... screwed.
Diplomacy is the art of saying, "Nice doggie!" until you can find a rock.
As much as I like it, I also fear it. I fear the end to the vast amount of free resources the internet has to provide. Yes I'd be great to be able to easily tip and contribute to projects and good resources ... but, what will a day of surfing cost when everyone is asking for $0.25 ?
... If it catches on to any extent they will be there to dominate it..
Lets hope this can cut into the Visa / Mastercard Manopoly???
Yahh right
Security Cameras
Gamblers Forum
One of the reasons that "tokens" for micropayments are unpopular is the same reason that everyone hates those coupons you have to buy when you go to the local fair. You know, every vendor takes only coupons, so if you want to eat, drink, ride a ride, take a crap, or do anything, you've gotta buy a coupon.
But think about the business model of these coupons: people buy a large chunk of them (more than they acually need, so they won't have to go back and get more), and then don't spend all of their tickets. However, you paid for $20 in tickets, and only bought $15 in food, so they've already raked in $5 without any spending but for cheap coupons.
However, fairs and the internet are two totally different venues. At a fair, there is a monopoly run by the owners, and you can't exactly warez some popcorn off of bittorrent. The internet allows for alternatives. For example, if the NYTimes decided to require microcash payments instead of microsoul payments, I'm pretty sure that slashdot and other similar sites will be devoid of links to the NYTimes site. This is survivable because we have things called mirrors and caches.
Would you say the same about someone who used "nigger" in a casual context? If not, why not?
I think we are missing an important way that Micropayments can be used.
The user can Earn money though Micropayments as well as spend.
Example:
Lets say you are a Meteorological organisation and you would like to get finer granularity of your barometric readings. You sell a mini weather station to a user, and the software provided captures the weather data for their location and uploads it to the Meteorlogical Bureau. The user earns Microcredits for this, cheaper than putting in your own weather stations.
I think Microcredits can be used both ways.
You can be paid for Rendering Images for a movie, performing 'Human Only' tasks for other companies, and have web sites that list all the things you can do to earn Microcredits.
Why can't I get paid in Microcredits to fold Protien Molecules for some Research Lab...
Suppose I'm charged $0.005 per pageview.
It's not inconcievable I could be charged a dollar a day, $365 per year. Can I afford that? And how about the stuff which charges whole cents per pageview, such as maybe news sites?
People recognize instinctively that small stuff adds up, and that small stuff for which you can't easily do the math in your head will wind up biting you.
This is why micropayments are DOA.
It seems like micropayments are a solution looking for a problem. Others have gone over the difficulties (mostly PR) that Rivest has; let's step back and take a look at why micropayments are meant to be exciting.
The idea, essentially, is that it allows people to make money off of their content in a new fashion. Instead of advertising or subscription, people pay, per use, to get content ad-free.
The web comics world is all very excited about this. Imagine! Cover your bandwidth and make money just for your art! No need to build a subscriber base for print copies, no need to get big enough to be ad-supported, no need to whore out on the side. Instead, get everyone to pay a tenth of a cent every time they want to read your page. Or maybe five cents for your monthly magnus opus.
Does this ever happen in the real world? When was the last time you paid five cents for anything other than a stick of gum from the General Store? Newspapers are the closest you get, but they are mostly ad-supported anyway, and your 75 cents is not coming close to defraying the cost of production. Perhaps giving money to buskers, but it's hard to imagine people would feel the same way about tossing a quarter to some anonymous fancy webmaster that they do about giving the same to some ragged hipster they see every day.
Meanwhile, except for a few self-promoters who also handily want you to deposit $10 in their micropayment system, web comic people are going with the old -- and apparently very function -- methods. They get advertising banners, they promote their hard copies, they do promotional work. Comics not big enough to hit this put up a paypal donation button, sell t-shirts, &c to the hard core fans who want to feel like they're supporting a cool indie artist. Meanwhile, musicians go out and give concerts; their mp3s and even their hard copy albums are mostly around to draw people in to hear a live performance.
So what is the big deal? It's an interesting intellectual problem, and this is a clever solution, but the idea of making scads of cash off of it -- and revolutionising internet content distribution -- seems to me to be a lot of hype, and something only those totally out of touch with how the various "worlds" of content have already solved this problem.
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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?
There are four sorts of people in the world: fools, lunatics, idiots and morons. - Umberto Eco, Foucaut's pendulum.
I was thinking along the same lines, but extending it a bit more. What happens when spyware infects your PC and starts spewing popup ads everywhere, charging you for the privilage? Or you mis-type a URL and get a hundred popup ads? I realise the former is very unlikely to happen with non-Windows users, but let's face it: most consumers today run Windows with IE, don't use Windows Update, and have never heard of a firewall.
Also wouldn't the businesses spend more money on processing these micropayments than the payments are? This system can only work on a truly large scale. This may force businesses to find a way of redcuing the costs associated with the internet, so it might actually work to our slight advantage.
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