A Viable System for Micropayments? 481
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."
Well I use (Score:2, Interesting)
To send money to people, it's £0.30 a payment, payed by the sender and you can send upto £100 ($150).
One Time Fees (Score:4, Insightful)
micropayments market- paypal? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:micropayments market- paypal? (Score:2, Informative)
And that is why PayPal is perfect for micropayment (Score:3, Insightful)
However, for small payments (which I'll arbitrarily set at $100 or less) they are fantastic. You can put money in the account, and just drain it that way (which is exactly what another poster was asking for). Even better, tie it to a throwaway bank account that you just keep a few hundred in and then drain money out of that.
I still like PayPal, I used to do a lot of online used book sales and they were perfect for that. I think they could be a great player in the micropayment space if they play it right.
Like leasing a car? (Score:5, Insightful)
I think that it will also introduce higher costs/byte because you are really paying for every byte. Where as in a pay-one-price model, sometimes you are the hog and others pay for you and sometimes you aren't.
In any case, neither is perfect, but a fixed price is the way for me.
Re:Like leasing a car? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Like leasing a car? (Score:2)
Aha... And the only people that have problems with all the DRM restrictions are the pirates... Suppose one day a hacker takes over your machine and uses it to host a large file for P2P... what do you think the cable company will do?
I suspect that very few clients (such as games or vide streaming clients) minimize the bandwidht used... you leave one of these things overnight and it can screw you over by feeding ads all night...
Re:Like leasing a car? (Score:4, Insightful)
Probably either suspend my account or charge me money. Why is this such a big problem? If someone took a joyride in my leased car, I'd be responsible for the mileage unless they caught the guy. It's no different here. Yeah, it's unfair, but it's the hacker's fault, not the cable companies.
I suspect that very few clients (such as games or vide streaming clients) minimize the bandwidht used... you leave one of these things overnight and it can screw you over by feeding ads all night.
Yeah, and if you leave the downstairs lights on all night they can screw you over by running up your electric bill. It doesn't matter if your not seeing the content, you're still using the bandwidth.
Re:Like leasing a car? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Like leasing a car? (Score:3, Interesting)
Kintanon
Re:Like leasing a car? (Score:4, Insightful)
This is a Joke Right (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:This is a Joke Right (Score:5, Insightful)
That's a joke right?
As far as I can tell your argument is:
Problem: There is no good information on the web. People only want to sell it to you.
Solution: Information should be free.
Information takes time, effort and money to create, interpret and distribute. For **quantity** (let alone **quality** one needs a viable system to move money (how society transfers work/effort) from the reader etc. to the creator.
Advertising is one--but has proven only minimally successful at best. Micropayments would reward directly reward what people want and would make it much easier to say... not have slashdot lose money.
Re:This is a Joke Right (Score:3, Interesting)
There is always a cost to produce information.
Example: I run a website for fans of the Legacy of Kain series of videogames. It costs me money to host, money to buy the hardware I need (video capture, chipped PS2 to play international games, etc.) It also costs me in terms of time to research the content for my site, write it up in at least a semi-interesting manner, and so forth. This is by far the greatest cost, and if I were working commercially, I'd have to pay someone a full time wage to do so.
I'm not interested in charging money for access to my site, but I can definitely sympathize with the online equivalent of magazines regarding the costs they incur to produce their content.
Re:This is a Joke Right (Score:3, Insightful)
ummm. The point of micropayments is to have information not free information. THEY are mutually exclusive.
I was critiquing the free information idea.
The most obvious solution to this problem is to charge different amounts depending on the economy of the viewer. (regarding poor people in India)
No, no no. You charge so as to have profitability (or perhaps maintainability). The person in India CAN'T AFFORD the information. It can be "given" (read exchanged for something of lesser value), but that's it. This is sad, but there are many things Indians cannot afford. One of them may be sophisticated U.S./EU internet delivered information.
Information may want to be free. But, in fact, it's really the only thing that has value.
Re:This is a Joke Right (Score:5, Insightful)
No? Thought so.
Re:This is a Joke Right (Score:4, Insightful)
You own (or rent, etc.) your home. You don't own the vast majority of the sites on the web you visit.
Re:This is a Joke Right (Score:3, Interesting)
Confusing Free Beer with Free Speech Again? (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm convinced that people like yourself really don't care at all about freedom, but rather preserving the Internet and your comfortable little cocoon. If you DID care about freedom, then you would respect one's freedom to run thier website they see fit.
It was easy to respect one's freedom, when thier only other option was subscription, because you know most people won't buy subscriptions, therefore most websites won't be subscription based.
Micropayments, on the other hand, really threaten you, because you know most people won't mind paying $.05 (or some other price) for a dirty cartoon, and that would require you to pay $.05 for the cartoon.
Admit it to yourself, you really don't care about people's freedom, you're just a cheapskate hanging on the coattails of this "Free the Internet" movement.
If you REALLY cared about people's freedom, you would respect people's freedom to ask (NOT DEMAND, NOT LEGISLATE, NOT MONOPOLIZE, NOT COMMUNIZE) for compensation.
It's only the cornerstone idea of the most successful economic system to have been implemented.
I don't know about you, but I can't think of many other ideas which has done as much to promote freedom and improve the quality of life, other than science (not technology, the dicipline).
hope this works (Score:2)
Pay Sites (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Pay Sites (Score:5, Insightful)
First of all, for many websites, their content is the service they provide. You don't pay to browse in a shop or peruse a sales catalog, but you are charged for a newpaper subscription, not because they deliver you a part of a dead tree, but because of the content.
Second of all, micropayments enable something far more important than subscriptions: one-off payments. Very often I just want something once from a website. I do not want to subscribe to Gamespot for $5 a month so I can access their premium content, but I would pay $0.50 to download that promo clip for a game I happen to be interested in. If I happen to be searching for a bit of Greek mythology, I won't subscribe at $5 a month to a site that offers this, since I don't need Greek mythology on a regular basis. However for that one time I'd pay $0.50 to get what I need.
That is the power of Micropayments: the ability to charge very small amounts for a one-time service. Credit cards or bank transfers do not offer this; the transaction costs would be prohibitive.
Re:Pay Sites (Score:3, Insightful)
Are you kidding me ? With the pervasiveness of some of the "content-based" site mongering out there, you'd think that they were offering "How to do Neuro-surgery in your bathroom" as their content.
When you've got a site that's listing codes for a video game, you've got to be kidding me, if I'm going to pay for the review ( that I have to sit through a rolling or popup ad for...over, next-to, or before, I can see ), why would you pay for a video clip of a game ( it IS an AD after all, call it what it is, for crimoney's sake ).
Look, it's very simple, what you're talking about is applying "intrinsic value" to "something". And frankly ( and I'm not the only one saying this ), most "content-based" sites are very much "trivial use". Notice I didn't say "ALL", I said most. Some, like a site that offers you "Dreamweaver templates" ( and frankly, for me to pay for a template, it better be ONE HELLUVA template ), I could see paying a one-time charge for downloading the code for that template ; if in fact it was going to save you HOURS and HOURS of coding. But sites such as those, and the WSJ ( Wall Street Journal, I know, I know, I said a bad word around here ), may offer REAL convinience ( i.e. alternative to having to pick up the soggy paper because the paperboy ditched it into you pond of POI because you didn't give him a xmas bonus ).
And for your "We pay too much broadband" weinies", what do you think it cost our folks and grandparents in today's dollars to pay for those highways and turnpikes ( as bad as they might be in some places ) we criss-cross the country on ? Peanuts ? Broccoli ? I don't know what the figure would be in today's dollars, but I remember my Dad telling me it was amazing to think of "All that money" going into the national highway system. That's for your cheeser cheesers in the valley and north east who don't think that any of their dollars should go to helping someone in the mississippi delta get broadband ( think about that the next time you want to order freshly caught shrimp from Bubba Gump).
Then again, $49.95 for ~1.5Mb DSL is a JOKE ! *are you listening Bellsouth *
Listen carefully, and repeat after me, "I will play on the next easiest level. I will not pay for cheat codes. I will not pay for preview clips of a game that's going to cost me $54.99 at EB, and will be 9 months late the day I buy it(but don't get me started on that)".
-- What ? You thought I'd have a
Re:Pay Sites (Score:4, Interesting)
- Cheat codes. You might not want to pay for that, but I know enough people who'd pay $1 to get a code to pass that pesky level on their playstation game... especially if it didn't involve giving out credit card details to questionable sites.
- Templates... if a template would save me a hour of coding, I'd readily pay $1 for it.
- Shareware. Instead of charging $10 to those people that decide they want to use it, charge everyone $0.50 for the download. If they think it's rubbish, they're out $0.50 which is nothing to cry over.
- You said templates... but there's a bunch of stuff out there waiting to be picked up and used. Artwork for websites especially. These days you need to pay a licencing fee for a whole set or buy a CD even if it's just one button you want to use. So, most people just steal the artwork, but if they could pay $1 for just the one button, perhaps they'd do so.
- Reviews. And I mean real reviews, not the stuff sponsored by game companies that are nothing but veiled ads. People subscribe to game magazines, I don't think it's too far-fetched for people to pull reviews from a site for a fee, if they know the reviews to be good.
- Pr0n. 'Nuff said.
And finally an example of an instance where people already pay for smallish and seemingly worthless item: ring tones. No one, not even the guys running the ringtone sites, expected this to take off as fast as it did. They're being downloaded by the thousands.
less than the cost of ... (Score:2, Insightful)
So it's less than the cost of Z. So what? It's not Z, it's not even remotely like Z, so why do we care that it costs less than Z?
Buy this car! At only $25k, it's less than the cost of a super computer or three trips around the world!
When I pay $8 for a movie, I get to watch a movie. If I rent two games, well, I get to play two games for a few days. But when I subscribe to FilePlanet, they let me download files. Fast. Files that I can usually get somewhere else, or can even get from FilePlanet itself but slower.
Now, if these files were only available from FilePlanet, and if they let you play the newest game for a few days or watch a new feature film, the analogy would be good. But they don't. They're promotional trailers, or crippled demos. And I can get them elsewhere for free!
Micropayments would make a lot more sense here, I think. A few cents for the convenience of not having to look somewhere else. But don't insult my intelligence by suggesting that it's less than the cost of a movie.
Re:less than the cost of ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Okay, I'll field this. People make these sort of silly comparisons because in their own minds they are equivelant. Obviously to you they aren't but for many people such a comparison as the one above is completely valid.
Re:Pay Sites (Score:3, Interesting)
Maybe no one else feel that way, but I have a problem with gamespot/filespy(whatever the other one with member access is called), etc... And the problem is that they do NOT seem to provide ORIGINAL content. I do not feel that I should pay gamespot to download a game demo! I think that the creator of the game should pay gamespot and have it posted freely if they have any interest in selling the game to me...
Re:Pay Sites (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem with all these site is they want you to *subscribe*. Fileplanet is kind of cool, and when you want a file from them, it might be worth a buck or two to get it from them. BUT, they want you to pay 7$ a month, thats 82$ a year to download files... Why cant I just give them 2$ when I want a file NOW?
And thats the problem with all these subsciption sites. I subscribe to emusic.com, for *15* a month. If I download 0 albums, or 100, they still get their 15$ a month, so what is their incentive to be actively pursuing new and intersting artists? Their incentive is to *not do anything* and save bandwith and personel costs and still collect my 15$ -- Thats why their downloader software fails all the time, and forgets albums you have qued.
Subscriptions reward companies for any quality of crap they put out, whereas a micropayment -- they only get money for *good* material.
Syndication (Score:4, Insightful)
Paying $50/year to subscribe to a site sounds like a lot of money, because it is. But if I could pay $100/year for ad-free access to all of my favorite sites on an a la carte basis, it'd sound like a bargain. That's where commercial Web content will have to go eventually. I can't imagine any alternatives that will meet the needs of both consumers and site operators in the long term.
It'd be nice if one or more of the major ISPs would offer a pilot program along these lines. Not necessarily MSN or TW/AOL; even someone like Speakeasy could make a credible effort at syndicating content for their members, IMHO.
Re:Syndication (Score:2)
You mean like the RIAA?
Re:Syndication (Score:2)
Re:Syndication (Score:5, Interesting)
This is why micropayments make some sense. However, as you have pointed out, micropayments are definitely more of a PITA (pain in the ass) for simple webbrowsing ("3 cents a page view? Fuck this!") than I think most people would be willing to stand.
I think the ideal solution would be a compromise - content syndication, flat monthly membership for access to a wide variety of web content where the content providers get a proportional share to the amount of raw usage of their actual "members-only" content. Premium content would be labelled as such, and would cause micropayment-style charges to accrue to your content syndicate account.
I actually think the other key selling point here would be the ability to control your own information. It's not too hard to imagine (and I have sketched out a framework for doing this) the content syndicate as a trusted organization that allows billing and personal information handling to be handled by third party "trust repositories" (sort of like the equivalent of setting up a VISA card account with a member bank that offers VISA cards) so that the content syndicate itself can't screw you over, and there can be competition on multiple levels.
This is the kind of thing that the Open Source community should get behind - go beyond making a simple alternative to Passport (the DotGNU folks and some others are working on things like this), and support a framework that actually innovates when it comes to rewarding content providers fairly and empowering web consumers... okay that sounds like marketing tripe, but hopefully you see the value in a proposal like this. Now please go ahead and flame away at my proposal.
Paying for pages... (Score:5, Insightful)
The digital nature of the web makes it very hard to keep track of how many copies of your website exist. What is to say that me and my friends don't make a proxy and all surf through that, thus only encurring the micropayment once? Then sharing the costs.
But personally I think the real reason that micropayments for the web won't work is that you will end up paying for the same thing multiple times. If you pay for a web page everytime you see it that is just wrong. If I pay for a web page then I want to be able to view it from any other computer, at any time. If you buy a page, then you want to show your friend, then you'd either have to keep the page open or pay for it again ( assuming that you left the page).
Filthy Lucre (Score:2, Insightful)
Collecting Payments This where you find yourself between a rock and a hard place.
Bottom line is that a whale of a lot of users believe simply that paying ANYTHING is not worth it and will skip to the next website.
This is unfortunate, but true.
A reduced base of clients equates to a higher payment for each, resulting in a downward spiral in users and revenue (unless you are fortunate enough to be running something as wildly popular as eBay or some such similar).
I like this approach (something needs to be done about the present setup), but I'm not so sure it's The Answer.
Guess we'll just have to implement it and see if it works or not, huh?
Micropayments for what....? (Score:2)
Also, I wouldn't exactly call it "viable" since the transaction fees on many $10 purchases (of what, I still have no idea) will generally be quite large. That's part of the reason why subscriptions for anything get cheaper the longer of period of time they're for.
How is this different from TV? (Score:2, Interesting)
Who provides the content?
The cable company, through both ads and charging for the service.
Since the ISP is the one benifitting from the content on the internet, one (self-preserving) way of keeping that content fresh would be to "give back" in some way.
Unfortunately, due to the nature of the 'net, this would add overhead to those "good" ISPs which want to contribute, allowing ISPs that want to give just basic service to run at a lower cost with lower overhead.
The other problem with this is that it promotes content that benifits the ISP -- somewhat analagous to how TV has been taken over by large corperate moguls, allowing only corperate consumers to have a voice except in very small areas (public access, for instance).
It's fortunate that the Internet can't be controlled in the same way as TV, but with webhosting bills and domain registration bills that quickly add up, I can see many people who run sites as a hobby eventually giving it up since it's an unnecessary monetary drain.
Perhaps that's how "good" ISPs could give back -- support the lowly webmaster with some cool content that's been overwhelmed... say, by a slashdotting...
Well, I'll go elsewhere (Score:3, Insightful)
They'd have to have some damn good and unique content if they expect people to pay for it. The current models probably come from people who know little about the internet, other than the fact that you might be able to make money with it.
I hope it doesn't go the way of mobile ring tones though; at one point they were free and practically overnight every free site was shutdown and the only sites available started charging for it. Overcharging to be more precise...yup, it's greed.
In case you missed it: (Score:2)
I'm curious as to how viable you think this system is and if you have any ideas for improvement.
How is this a viable system? (Score:3, Insightful)
There's no mention of how to actually collect the micropayments, just mystical hand waving about rocks and hard places.
This article could have used just a little more substance...
About half a cent (Score:2)
If you're looking at a wholesale price for a 20Gb per month account of being around $500 to $1000, then that's $25 to $50 per Gb would be about a quarter of a cent to half a cent per page.
Information wants to be free (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Information wants to be free (Score:2)
What?? (Score:2)
The "Viable System for Micropayments" article describes how to setup user accounts and provides a program to parse Apache logs to "... allow you to easily see how popular an account is and whether or not you need to take action. " Plus, for his collecting payments, he says use PayPal or VeriSign. Most of the actual "system" is not automated at all. How is this news at all? What is new about this system?
Viable? (Score:2)
Lemme get this straight, you are basically charging all of your customers MANUALLY based on your apache log files, through a thrid party billing company not set up for this? Doable for a few dozen users, but I can't imagine manually creating 1,000s of bills for a few pennies each.
Call me back when your site integrates with a true automated micropayment system that gives users flexibility and the ability to decide to view pages in advance based on cost - not an after the fact credit card bill.
Flawed reasoning... (Score:5, Insightful)
Um no, the problem is not that people don't want to pay for products. The problem is that there's little to no value in most content on the web to pay for. Let me put that in even simpler terms: The web has virtually no content that's worth paying for. It has nothing to do with the idea that everything on the net is free.
Don't believe me? Then explain to me how porn is able to thrive? Porn is delivered for free in generous servings, yet people still whip their credit cards out and buy stuff. Why? Because the net provides what they want. Imagery/Video + the privacy of their own home.
I'm shocked that the MPAA/Broadcast hasn't looked at how successful porn has been on the web and not realized the potential earnings they could make with their content. If they sold copies of TV shows using DivX
Anyway, my point is simply that the demand is there, it's the supply that's missing. It's not the other way around like the author is suggesting.
Re:Flawed reasoning... (Score:2)
-Alison
Re:Flawed reasoning... (Score:3, Interesting)
It used to be taboo a few years ago, but today that's not an issue anymore. It's become generally accepted that everybody has browsed porn on the web at one point or another, whether it be intentional or not. Heck, I remember suggesting to my dad that we trade bookmarks once. Heh my step-mom didn't like that convo at all.
I don't think the sharing of videos is much of an issue here. The fact of the matter is that with the bandwidth caps in place, it isn't worth sharing videos if they provide them at a decent price. I'd *happily* buy episodes of Deep Space Nine if I could download them from a server that's reliable. The only reason I have to search for content shared by individuals today is that I have no other way to obtain it. That's why the Mystery Science Theater 3000 Digital Archive Project is up and running w/o legal troubles. The show was cancelled and is not in reruns. (At least not the first 6 seasons) Only a handful of them are available on VHS/DVD, so what do we do? Let it die?
Give me the ability to buy these on a per-episode basis and you'll make money. I won't care of it's available to be shared.
Re:Flawed reasoning... (Score:3, Funny)
It could be worse, you could find your mother in chick-on-chick flicks!
Re:Flawed reasoning... (Score:2)
YES! YES! YES! YES!
I can't tell you how many times I have been reading online and something triggered a memory of a favorite episode of a show.
I'd love to watch it. Now. Not in three days when I find a DVD and it's sent.
Charge me $2.00 to get it now. Encrypt my credit card info in it. I don't care. I won't be sharing it, but I will be watching it again. Make sure I can watch it more than once.
I am so confused as to why the RIAA and MPPA don't open the floodgates. Many people say it's because they want to start their own services, but they've had three years. Let's go
What's more, when you buy a magazine. . . (Score:3, Insightful)
If you buy the right magazines you can even store them for a while and then resell them for a profit better than what you'll get by putting your money in CD's.
A magzine isn't just "content." It's a *thing.* And it's yours. And it may well even be an *investment.*
There are damned few web pages even worth the saving.
Now look at newspapers, and format perhaps more akin to web pages than a magazine. $0.50 will buy you almost more "content" than you can absorb on a daily basis.
Tell me, how muchs is each *story* worth in a newspaper? Rather less than a penny. And you can *still* roll the paper up and use it as an aritficial log afterwards, or mulch your garden with it.
If the web really wishes to compete with print on delivering "content" on a commercial basis than it has to do so by offering better value at a *lower* price.
Having a *thing* is part of the value of print. The "content" of a web page is nearly worthless, the cost of delivering it is irrellevant to that.
KFG
the problem with micropayments (Score:2)
So that this actually works we need a new bank-like network of entities that will all be able to transfer money from the user to the website. The micropayment itself is just a small counter. Websites don't receive a payment for each webpage but instead receive an aggregate transfer every day (for example). This can't all be done by one entity (Paypal and Passport come to mind) because you don't want the mechanism to transfer money on the internet to be a monopoly. The ideal setup would probably be some major traditional banks stepping up and providind this service.
Education (Score:2, Insightful)
No, and you can follow the tollbooth logic - the fact that I pay taxes which go to building highways doesn't save me from having to shell out some moolah at the tollbooth. But until you educate people otherwise, then yes, as far as they're concerned their ISP bill is enough. After all, everything used to be free on the Internet, eh? Why should I start paying now?
User (customer!) education is the key. But there needs to be some sort of paradigm Billy Bob Joe can relate to in order to shell out some of his hard-earned money.
What that is of course I have no idea.
The success of micropayments will also lead to another interesting scenario: consolidation. Instead of there being 7 free hardware review sites you'll have only two. Just like the real world, commercial pressures and competition will eventually do away with diversity. I'm not making any judgement on whether or not that would be good. That's fodder for another thread.
The flip side of course is bandwith becoming extremely cheap, which is also a possibility.
Need a unified pay system (Score:5, Insightful)
Interesting, but think bigger... (Score:2)
I like your solution, but I think it would be more effective if you took a little bigger approach. Instead of using Verisign or Paypal for the actual transactions, do it yourself. This is of course impractical for small discrete payments, but if you implemented it as a certain number of page views for $10 (like Slashdot [slashdot.org] did) it might be feasible.
What I meant by thinking bigger is to record page views across several sites web users visit. That way I can pay $10 and get 1000 page views at DevZone [icarusindie.com], WDVL [wdvl.com], 4GuysFromRolla [4guysfromrolla.com], jguru [jguru.com], and other sites who chose to participate.
for larger scale try Clickshare (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [clickshare.com]
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
Paying for bandwidth (Score:2, Redundant)
As you can see by the chart found on the main page IcarusIndie has been running at 60-80% capacity and growing. It became necessary to find a way to either cut bandwidth usage or make money to increase available bandwidth.
Suggested short-term solution: don't voluntarily post a link to your site on Slashdot.
Why not micropayment from a $10 credit card debit? (Score:3, Interesting)
Characteristics that cause micropayment methods to fail:
Business people are self-destructive. Every one seems to dream of making a billion dollars overnight.
Technical people aren't business people.
Why not charge people's credit cards a minimum fee like $10? Then you could refund the balance in case someone did not spend it all and wanted to close an account. The account could keep track of the amount and reason that micro-debits were made. This has the advantage that you hold the money while the purchases are being decided.
I found my solution to be... (Score:3, Informative)
US$10 annually to avoid ads from all reg'd sites? (Score:2)
Notice that this doesn't prevent per-site micropayment schemes from coexisting alongside it, when there are special services or products also being offered at the sites.
But the system is misnamed -- no longer micro (Score:2)
cough cough
Well, whatever works I guess!
Huh? (Score:2)
Nielsen argues that there's a need for pricing between free and full subscription. He advocates micropayments _precisely_ to create that middle ground.
Then you step in and a) criticize Nielsen for not recognizing the possiblity of small payments , b) propose an alternative form of micropayment in which a significant fee is charged in return for year-long access and c) offer some sample code that AFAICT offers a primitive account tracking system.
Unless this is just a troll, in which case I applaud its subtlety and congrtaulate you on getting it to the front page, your idea is really unclear. It's flattering that you think you can show me some C code and Apache configurations and expect me to understand the point, but you need to make it clearer so I can tell which one of us is completely missing it.
gee, what timing (JavaWorld goes "subscription") (Score:2)
A question on that -- do the authors of old articles get any more compensation when their material is effectively "sold" a second time (which is certainly the case in JavaWorld). In England, Robert Fripp won a very significant lawsuit on the issue of artist compensation when the back catalog of EG was sold to Virgin and BMG without the bands getting a dime at first.
The problem is what I'm used to... (Score:3, Insightful)
To clarify, in my view, an ISP charges you for general access to hardware, i. e. the cost to view a web-site in say Australia is the same cost you would pay to see content at usatoday. The micro- or macro-pay schemes don't eleminiate a hardware charge, so I would essentially pay MORE for LESS. The real problem is the 'AOL Mindset', that once I pay this connect charge I have the internet to myself, unless a site requires a credit-card (ahem). Look at Salon.com, it's obvious that no one site has a lock on insight and editorial content (well, maybe slashdot), but with all the freely available content on the net, it's hard to put up a door charge.
This isn't micropayments (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Gamespot's subscription (Score:2)
At IGN, you have to pay for the new stuff and eventually it ages into the free section. (Some stuff may always remain pay-only. I don't know.) At GameSpot, most everything is free for a limited time, but then ages into the pay-only archive.
Of the coverage I've read, I prefer GameSpot, and so chose to pay for that service.
Because I enjoy playing games on older systems and games that have been out for a while on newer systems (see my site [linuxgames.com]), the pay-only archive at GameSpot is useful to me. They go back to the Saturn and PSX with their reviews, and these have made for some reasonably good reading and research of games to try out. Also, if I'm considering a game in Sony's cheapo Greatest Hits lineup, then the full review is probably in the pay-only archive.
The GameSpot model is friendly to the daily reader (free access, albeit with adverts) and the long-time reader (no adverts, old content) who doesn't mind paying. I'm not sure who likes IGN's model. It's worth noting that IGN's reviews are often posted to USENET by a subscriber when they're initially published online and only accessible to subscribers.
Anyway, that's all I wanted to say. Different models, and a distinction that I think is worth looking at, especially in the long term.
I dont think so... (Score:5, Insightful)
You know, its thinking like this that have made the world full of greed and corporate robbery and gouging.
Yes, there is some content out there that should be charged for - and it already is charged for. Then there is content that should not be charged for - and its not.
"premium content" as some site like to call it (i.e. CNN) is just that. Content that is available upon subscription to that service.
When the article states "people think their ISP bill is an all access pass to the Internet" thats dangerously close to the MPAA and RIAA thinking that. The thing is that some people just need to get lost when they want to charge for every thing under the sun.
I am all for people and companies making money - but please, you dont need to charge for every god awful word you write or post on the net. Get over yourself. Your content probably isnt even worth 10 cents.
Value of content is something that seriously needs to be adressed here. The value of an item is based on its desirability to others - the more desirable the item the more its value.
Defining desirability is much more difficult. For example - I do read CNN.com, I rarely watch CNN on TV, and I never would consider paying for CNN's premium content. Whenever there is a story that is in the premium only section, I dont see it - and I have no problem with that. If CNN decides to charge for *all* content on cnn.com - I just simply wont read it. so I guess their content is as desirable as they may think.
now - back to the all access pass idea. OF COURSE I think that way. I pay more for internet access than I do cable TV. I have some hundred plus station on my att digital cable (hate at&t) and I pay a lump fee to see all of them. I dont pay for "Premium CNN" via cable. Why would I consider paying for it online?
anyway - all these fools that think they are going to somehow revolutionize (read enslave) the internet and make us pay for every click of the mouse should just take their greedy asses and screw off.
We certainly dont want the internet to become modeled after the cable tv media structure.
Greed? (Score:3, Insightful)
Greed? Heaven forbid that content providers should expect people to pay for the content and not just the bandwidth!
Writers and artists like getting paid for their work, not to mention the costs of the computers, networking equipment, sysadmins, network engineers, security techies, and so on. None of those people work cheap, because even in a bear market, there is still a huge demand for people who can keep the computers running.
People think that the internet as a medium somehow cuts out the expensive middleman simply because there is not storefront; all the internet really does is switch to a different middleman, and that middleman is not necessarily cheaper or more efficient right now. Micropayments is a stupid system, because charging people in tiny amounts will never really generate the revenue needed to cover the incredible costs of online media.
Micropayments don't work b/c of credit cards (Score:5, Interesting)
None the less, work out all the other issues, and you'll still have this one to work through. The idea of a syndicate has been mentioned, and that's one great approach - one charge, many members. I just don't have hope that any of these ideas will gain critial mass.
What the hell? (Score:5, Interesting)
Anyway, here are some obvious problems with what is there, even:
- Why change the name of the htaccess file? Apache by default makes sure that nobody can download a file called
- It's a really bad idea to use Visual Basic's deterministic Rnd function to generate passwords. (!)
- It's easy to use xcmd or bash or perl to make htpasswd read from a file, just like his program does.
- No programs around that analyze apache logs?? Holy crap, are you serious?? (http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=UTF-8&oe=U
Oh goody for me!!!! (Score:3, Interesting)
I could actually make a few dollars from the games m friends and I developed at www.coldfirestudios.com.
This idea has serious potential!!
No
I don't like the idea of having to charge people to play my games, but if the "whole internet" moved in that direction, then it may not be a bad idea
Where's the Content? (Score:2)
Who has got sites out there worth paying $10 for anyway? And then how do you market it so the can kick the tires?
free is bad? (Score:2)
I'm surprised that a sentence like that made it onto slashdot! This is, after all, the forum of "I want my mp3's for free but it's not piracy because 'information wants to be free' and I want my news for free to because, well, by golly, I've always gotten it for free!". This is not to say that I see anything wrong with being cheap (as long as the cheap action isn't piracy). I'm just surprised that based on the prevalent groupthink here (even among the editors, and deny it all you like, it's still a form of groupthink) that there would be any countenance given to a different opinion. In any case, when it comes to subscription services, I think the argument can be made either way. You can look at the newspaper and magazine model, where you pay a subscription for a particular content source, and they advertise to you. You can also look at the television model where you pay a subscription fee for multiple content sources and they all advertise to you, but outside the single fee, they can't charge you any more (unless you want PPV). I guess I don't see a problem with sites attempting to charge what they can for the services they offer, but those sites should keep in mind the concept of supply and demand...and with the multitude of 'free' sites out there, I suspect the 'pay' sites won't do quite as well.
The only via model is something like cable (Score:5, Interesting)
The current situtation is something like being forced to subscribe to every cable channel you watch individually. It would not be workable, as each channel has a radically different value to each individual. It's the same way with web sites. For example, byte.com just went subscription. I read it only for Jerry Pournelle. Now Pournelle is an interesting guy, but paying $12/yr for his column alone just isn't worth it (I don't care about any of the other columnists). Similarly, Imagine if every cable channel cost $10/year, and you had to subscribe individually, and each station handled it's own billing seperately. Sure, I like the Food channel, and might occassionally watch it, but is it worth $10/year? (TNN might be, for the ST:TNG marathons alone).
This is why your cable provider serves as a content aggregater, mediating the different values each customer places each component of it's content. As long as costumers are satisfied with the whole package, for the price they are paying, it doesn't matter if one is an HBO freak or the other is a CNN freak. They balance each other out and both HBO and CNN can pay their bills.
This is why ISPs need to become more like cable companies. They should offer packages which provide pre-paid subscriptions to various high value, or value added content. I could sign up for the news-nut package and get WSJ online, CNN streaming coverage, etc... and it all just goes on my DSL bill. Add in high quality (and add free) internet radio and streaming video and I'd be a happy camper.
This model would work, and I predict it will be the way it works in the future.
-josh
Not worth reading (Score:4, Insightful)
Collecting Payments
This where you find yourself between a rock and a hard place.
If you're going to post an article about micropayments, you're going to have to make the micropayments and the associated economics the lead of the article, not the tail. Important questions unasked:
* A system for refunds
* A system for letting people reload pages
* A way to get people to trust your payment system (i.e. what if I pay my $10 and you go out of business)
* The cost of doing this business
* Dealing with forgeries
I've never before complained about an article on Slashdot, but this is truly a waste of time.
Aggregation, not micropayments (Score:5, Insightful)
Clay Shirky has written this excellent article [openp2p.com] against micropayments. His case is that users prefer Aggregation, Subscription or Subsidy as alternatives to continuously making decisions about content.
Assuming that small sites will not have enough worthy content to go the subscription route and that subsidy (i.e. advertising) is increasingly running dry, the only realistic option is Aggregation. I think that non-exclusive, subscription-based networks of affiliated sites are a much more realistic answer. If, e.g. my OSDN subscription would get me access to premium /., Freshmeat, SF, etc. content I would be much more likely to buy it. What if though an indy site could buy itself (with a % of user usage) into the OSDN network? Presto! profit for OSDN, convenience for its subscribers and potential revenue for small-fry websites.
Please, steal this idea now.Adios search engines and spam!! (Score:3, Insightful)
But even better, this would DEFINATELY stop those annoying email bots from collecting email addresses from web pages!!!!
This may not be the best answer to making web sites profitable, but may have indirectly found a way to keep people like Ralsky (the famous email spammer)from refreshing his spam email lists!!!
This just might be a good idea
HURRAY FOR MICROPAYMENTS!!! - they saved my mailbox!
(but made it too expensive for me to read email too)
How I know we aren't ready for micropayments yet (Score:5, Insightful)
When I think about content online that I'm willing to pay some amount of money to access, porn makes it onto the list. Some other no-doubt worthy sites don't.
I don't want to pay $10 a month to access exclusive adult content. I want to pay $1 (or maybe only $.25 - some sites have "try free for a day, just givde us your Visa number" but that's a well-known scam anyway) and just get to the handfull of images/movies/whatever I visited the site to get. Basic economics... and it could be applied anywhere.
But the porn people have the most desired content online. They know it. They could make it happen. Either they have chosen not to, or they haven't gotten it to work yet (and I'll admit that I've not found a site that's tried), which tells me that either the interest isn't there or it's just not workable.
So, all I can say to the people screaming about micropayments is, if the porno sites aren't doing it, the rest of the web won't either. When they get around to needing to grow their market again, they'll make it happen, and suddenly the idea will be more palatable to everyone.
Comments?
Let's return to the roots of the Internet (Score:3, Insightful)
Let everyone be a publisher. Clearly, TCP/IP is set up for it. The nebulous 'they' have brute forced a client-server mindset on what is the original peer-to-peer network mechanism. I'd pay an extra $10/month or whatever the costs are for my bandwidth to publish what I want, how I want, where I want.
Such heretical statements from a person with an MBA you may be wondering? Yup. But I'm the same guy with an MBA who wondered how all these Internet startups got so much VC funding for having business plans that made the Underpants Gnomes look like Warren Buffet.
There's not much money in selling services. Yes, the US economy is mostly a service based economy. But how long will that last when, for example, customer service is being outsourced to companies in India?
The term 'profit' to an economist means money over and above what a fair market would provide. That's not to say there is no financial profit. Financial profit lets the entrepreneur eat and have a house. Economic profit lets you hire Emeril LeGasse as your personal chef and live in a house built by Bob Vila. What prevents economic profit? Information about the buyer and seller. Low transaction costs. That's why small sites can get by. The owners can eat and provide bandwidth. But they aren't going to be Bill Gates. That's fine. They aren't supposed to be (neither is Bill Gates, but that's another story:)
But as others have pointed out in this thread, my fellow MBA's are looking to become overnight millionaires. Until they give up that tact, it won't happen.
I dare you to mod up this garbled mess.
Witness the decline (Score:3, Insightful)
I will try not to single out the person who wrote this article..
But it is interesting to witness the decline of the internet. Recall if you can, though we are probably all too young to have witnessed, that the advent of both television and radio where to revolutionize Society and Culture in the world bringing about a Renaissance the likes of which have never been witnessed.
The reality is we have way too many commercials on both Radio and Television (and the Internet?). Additionally, the only content you can find is that which is targeted to the highest spending demographical entitiy in the Society.
There is no cultural revolution. This is a continued example of how the internet will, like all it's predecessors, become nothing more than a petri dish of cultures that are dutifully harvested of whatever monies may come.
Examine carefully the history of Radio and Television before the FCC locked everything down and before the FM spectrum was owned by only a few companies.... This is a repeat of the same.
EZPass micropayment system (Score:4, Interesting)
If I have to pay to access sites that I am already paying to have the ability to connect to, that also is ridiculous.
However, this was supposed to be a discussion about micropayments, not a rant, so if micropayments are a must, the solution is easy. Do the same thing that EZPass [ezpass.com] (and other) tollbooths do. Have a $30 account credited. When you use that up, another $30 is automatically charged. EZPass would never work if each time you went through the tollbooth it charged your credit card $1.
done.
Transactions cost money (Score:3, Informative)
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.
The real reason no one wants to pay for anything (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is that for the average person, the vast majority of what's on the web isn't worth paying for. It doesn't matter how easy it is to pay for, or how reasonable the cost is. There's just no demand for it.
Think of the web as the world's largest bookstore. I -- or anyone else -- might spend a couple of hours at the local Barnes and Noble browsing, but I don't buy everything I look at, and generally don't buy anything on the average visit. Now and then, I see something worth shelling out for, and I buy it. Brick and mortar retailers know this and understand that it's part of the game, and they don't sit around at night thinking up schemes for a per-book browsing fee. If they did, hardly anyone would ever come into the store, much less buy anything. For some reason -- perhaps the total lack of business knowledge that has afflicted online ventures from the beginning -- website producers just don't get this.
On the average day, I visit a couple dozen sites, including Slashdot, Freshmeat, CNN, Google, EurekAlert, various King Features and UFS comics, the New Online Books Page, a couple of hometown newspapers, etc. How many of these would I pay for if I had to? None of them. If I knew that the only way for them to stay online was for people like me to pay for them, I still wouldn't pay for them.
It's not that these aren't mostly fine sites, but the calculation being made here isn't their intrinsic value but rather the opportunity cost. If Site X was the only source of entertainment in my life, I'd surely pay a fair (maybe even unfair) price for it, but I have to ask myself -- would I rather get a book, a CD, rent a movie, spend a weekend at the beach, buy a camcorder, buy dinner, fix the car, etc., instead of subscribing to (or buying individual page views from) a website? In a word, no.
It's not just me, either, to judge from the state of the web content business. For the vast majority of people, the main value of the web lies in the fact that the content is free and convenient. Take that away, and very few people will be willing to pay for anything at all, and very few of them will do more than they do with the paper equivalent -- maybe subscribe to a newspaper, and maybe a couple of magazines. The sad and perhaps shocking truth is that the web just isn't very entertaining compared to traditional media.
Re:The real reason no one wants to pay for anythin (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem is that for the average person, the vast majority of what's on the web isn't worth paying for. It doesn't matter how easy it is to pay for, or how reasonable the cost is. There's just no demand for it.
I find that an illogical position. There is hardly anything that is "not worth paying for" in a pure sense. As Jacob Neilson points out, you "pay" for an article on CNN with your time. It is only "free" if you value your tie at $0.00. Most people do not. And then you are also paying with bandwidth. If it was truly the fact that Web content was valueless, nobody would use the Web. But they do. Therefore there is some financial price that is small enough to be lost in the noise of the other costs. e.g. Who would complain if after a month of normal surfing they had an extra $1.00 tacked on to their bill but had never seen a banner ad during that period? A buck for a month without banners and popups on all of my favorite sites? I'd probably opt-in for that!
But the problem has always been: "How do we exact that extremely low cost with an equally small hassle to the user and yet give the user the sense that they are in control?" And there is the associated problem that the Web is a massively decentralized system so there are huge technical deployment issues.
If Site X was the only source of entertainment in my life, I'd surely pay a fair (maybe even unfair) price for it, but I have to ask myself -- would I rather get a book, a CD, rent a movie, spend a weekend at the beach, buy a camcorder, buy dinner, fix the car, etc., instead of subscribing to (or buying individual page views from) a website? In a word, no.
It isn't a question of "website subscription" versus "buy a CD". That presumes that the prices are equal. The appropriate question is whether a hundred website pages are worth a print magazin. Or a thousand. Or ten thousand. Or a million. Or a billion. If the answer is really that a billion web page views are not worth the price of a print magazine to you then I don't know why you waste your time on the web at all.
It's not just me, either, to judge from the state of the web content business. For the vast majority of people, the main value of the web lies in the fact that the content is free and convenient. Take that away, and very few people will be willing to pay for anything at all, and very few of them will do more than they do with the paper equivalent -- maybe subscribe to a newspaper, and maybe a couple of magazines.
The whole point of micropayments is that you don't think of it as being like a subscription to a newspaper or a couple of magazines.
In summary, despite what you say, the question of pay-to-play content on the Web _does_ come back to "how cheap", "how easy" and "how much do I trust the process." If a micropayment scheme could answer those three questions right (a big _if_) then yes, it _would_ be viable in competition with other media. It's basic economics that even if the Web is not as entertaining as other media (another big "if"), it can win if it is sufficiently cheaper and easier. You haven't explained why you think the laws of economics do not apply in this case.
Its not about the content, its about delivery (Score:4, Interesting)
Most analogies are that the micropayment or subscription is paying for access to the content itself. Its been well established that except for porn, there isn't much else on the internet that a large audience would pay for. Probably true. But, change the way you look at things... its not about the content... its about the delivery of content.
Much like a subscription to a magazine, are you paying for the content, or how the content is delivered? Think of it in terms of the delivery. The magazine is giving you the content for free, but you're paying for it to be delivered on pages bound together and distributed to your mailbox.
Like a magazine, I'm working on setting up a subscription based service for my growing website. I'm not charging for content... I'm charging for delivery. My idea is to provide free access to all of my content online, BUT... the value is in the delivery. I've discovered that people are willing to pay for custom content delivery via channels such as email, PDA, etc.
So, when I publish an article on my website, if you're a subscriber, the article will be dropped directly into your inbox. Bam... value via delivery, not content. Sometimes, the article will arrive to the subscriber's email prior to being published on the site.
Yes virginia, there is value in content delivery... people need to stay informed. Its easier to stay informed when the content is being delivered directly to the recipients, rather than the recipients having to go to the source.
Get it?
Micropayment Utopia (Score:3, Insightful)
Utopian micropayment predictions always seem to ignore the basic desire to maximize profits. They predict a utopia where vast amounts of content are available with automatic payments so tiny that nobody will be bothered. But why would any author/provider leave all that money on the table? Why would they not increase prices to what the market will bear?
Today there is a lot of "content" available for free, or for "free registration". That would change. Virtually anything worthwhile that exists today for free would almost certainly go to micropayments. Lots of worthless content would also go to micropayments, because even a small amount of money from occasional readers would be better than nothing. Shopping sites and some purely non-commercial sites would likely be the only places left that cared more about getting lots of viewer (paying nothing) than a smaller number of viewers (paying "micro" amounts).
But would also truely high quality content appear? Maybe, but micropayments would have to be a pretty successful business opportunity before substantial new investments get made (other than re-purposing content authored for other media). Even then, the drive to maximize profits would be the primary driver. One way to maximize profits might be to produce something truely great and hope that a lot of people find it. Another might be to produce LOTS of mediocre content (as cheaply as possible) and make small returns on each piece. Another might be to put a large portion of the resources into "marketing" the content (getting paid hits) as opposed to the development of the content itself.
Luckily, micropayments appear to be unworkable for the forseeable future (people love flat fees and hate metered services, financial transactions cost too much to process, and financial institutions are also driven to maximize profits and burden the transaction as much as the market will bear). If all these problems ever get worked out, I believe we'll all be looking back on the glory days of the World Wide Web, when one could easily surf around and find lots of info about almost anything.
micropymts encourage vendor fraud & salami-sli (Score:3, Insightful)
Then there is the problem of salami-slicing: micropayments encourage vendors to break up any actually useful info into as many little bits as they can possibly get away with. You hit the first bit, find it useful (make a micropayment), go fetch the next bit, make another micropayment, and so on. With micropayments, the incentive to create comprehensive web pages, pages that present the needed info succintly and showing the proper relationships amoung the elements of the data, would disappear.
Finally, we need the ability to browse around, looking for what it needed, before payments are made; paying only the hits that actually prove useful. Micropayments fail this test big-time.
Good effort, but it's not that simple (Score:3, Insightful)
I run the IT development wing of a medium size software and services company. I don't have a formal background in financial or managerial accounting, but I've acquired some knowledge in my years, and you would not believe how much I do while acting as the watchdog that ensures our systems (and processes) will not become potential sources of customer fraud. And that means that all our systems (and business models) are built with an eye towards passing a financial audit without raising concern.
Why am I saying this? Because as engineers we sometimes forget that the technical answer to a solution isn't enough; especially the moment you begin taking money from someone as quid pro quo for a service or product you are offering.
When you start accepting money from customers, you must think carefully about the fact that chances are very good that someone has handled a transaction like this before--and been hauled into court for it--or likely will handle a transaction like this in the future and later get hauled into court. Because of that, there are a great number of laws that exist governing how we do business, and there are the Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) that provide guidance to businesses regarding the documentation and processes they should have in place to ensure they can properly state their business performance but also demonstrate that they are neither the victims nor perpetrators of fraud.
Almost there, bear with me. So, a micropayment system for bandwidth usage--because bandwidth is such a fungible resource--must have a mechanism that is precise and defensible in a court of law, and it must pass the muster of the CPAs who will eventually come check your books so that you can stay in business. That means:
1) You have to demonstrate you are charging exactly what you said you would charge, calculated the way you said you would. Are you ready to assert your mechanism will always give the right answer, when speaking to a customer (or accountant) who may understand what Apache is?
2) Unless you state clearly why you are not doing so (i.e., you have different services to offer), each customer must be charged the same price for the same thing. Are you sure your system won't accidentally overcharge one customer and undercharge another? What if you customer's compared notes?
3) What if a customer asks you to justify the bill? How would you do that? And if an accountant, 12 months later, asked you to justify the charge to a customer for a specific week of service, what documentation or digital trail would you provide that would precisely show why the charge was what it was?
I could probably go on, causing great boredom to most of Slashdot and you, I'm sure, but I just wish to point out that micropayments are fine, but the systems required to support them are very complex *because* of the requirements like the ones I've listed above. And thus very expensive, with more twists and turns than you've elucidated on a single page.
Again, my commendation to you for proposing an idea for Slashdot to, well, slash. But I couldn't let another post go up detailing a business or technical idea that is still too ungerminated too yet succeed. Best wishes!
Fundamentally changing the web (Score:3, Insightful)
The most obvious result is that the ability to put information up on the web for others to access FOR FREE will go poof. Pick and choose your own reason:
- ISPs increasing their bandwidth or hosting charge, because their clients are now getting payments for their pages and thus have more money;
- ISP hosting agreements based on a share of the micropayments recieved;
- Copy protection becoming standard on web pages to prevent free reposting of charged-for material; protection including a measure that bars viewing of unprotected content to prevent cracking; tools for creating viewable content too expensive for free creators or not for sale to non-businesses because they "can't be trusted";
- Linking becoming a commercial deal, in which free users can't participate because sites will pay linkers to hide links to the free competition;
- Search engines likewise charging a fee for users AND making money for sending them preferentially to charged content.
And then, of course, the web dies very quickly. Because if you can't reasonably display stuff for free, nobody can read your stuff without paying. But they don't want to buy a cat in a bag (especially not after the inevitable initial race of $1-to-view lots-of-bogus-keywords pages)- so they go off to a site they already know. No new site can get started, because nobody wants to be the guy who takes the risk of the first hit, and that isn't going to change because it's just peachy as far as all those sites are concerned and the ISPs aren't bothered either. Search engines die because nobody searches anymore.
In other words, it's the PageRank Effect writ large and with money. Heck, next thing, those sites will start to offer to save the user the price of their internet connection by providing one themselves, for accessing their site only, that's bunded with their micropayments. Congratulations, we have just rolled back to BBSs.
A bad idea that keeps coming back (Score:3, Interesting)
Another big downside of micropayments is that the cost of accounting, billing, and collecting can easily exceed the cost of providing the service. That's been true of off-peak-hour telephony for years. Off-peak cellular rates reflect this.
Worse, once you put in a payment system, the amount of user attention required to use it is high. Users will fear (with reason, given the history of slamming, cramming, and 900 number overcharging) that they will be ripped off.
Only two non-porno web sites really succeed as pay sites - Consumers Union and the Wall Street Journal. Both are operated by organizations with very good reputations and long histories.
Pay through your ISP (Score:3, Interesting)
I'd like to suggest a method whereby your ISP pays your surfing bill and then bills you back. It could work something like this.
1) Browse to foo.com
2) Site "foo.com" sends back a warning that pages are priced at
3) You agree by digitally signing
4) Your signing tells your ISP to record pages you visit at foo.com and pay foo.com
5) your ISP tells foo.com that it will pay
6) foo.com trusts your ISP and serves web pages to you.
7) you receive a bill from your ISP.
This method has the advantage of allowing anonymous access to pay sites as the ISP is acting as your agent, OK your ISP knows what sites you've visited, but they know that anyway.
Micropayments will NEVER work (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:ASK slashdot? (Score:2)
However, this particular "question" may form an interesting start for a debate about why micropayments don't work.
IMHO it is for the same reason that we had the dot com implosion: in order to work, micropayments require lots of transactions in order to generate a significant amount of revenue. Typically the critical amount of transactions never materializes.
Re:ASK slashdot? (Score:2)
Maybe this sentence in the writeup -
I'm curious as to why a large fee is the only option.
A rhetorical question, if you ask me.
Re:ASK slashdot? (Score:2)
Why Micropayments suck. (Score:5, Informative)
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 [netparadox.com]
Planet P Blog [planetp.cc] - Liberty with Technology.
Re:Why Micropayments suck. (Score:4, Informative)
Then there's the problem of upstream service providers - some places things are layered up too much with everyone taking their own slice. Not sure how much of a problem this is in Japan or Korea. It's not as bad in Canada as in the US - although the options are more limited in Canada.
Re:How do you account? (Score:3, Interesting)
Another "ask slashdot" that we all could have done without.
Maybe we need a new category - or maybe we could have a poll every day, and only the winner gets to "ask slashdot".
Re:One reason why micropayments haven't worked (Score:3)
Re:Otherland (Score:2)
Now wait moment, that's a bullshit argument. Web pages can be provided to the end user for free, that has been clearly proven in the past few years. OK, we get adverts and so on, and annoying popups, but it's a price we are willing to pay to have the worlds largest library at our fingertips.
What we are seeing here are people wanting to charge for websites just because they can and they think they may get money out of it.
The web is one of mankinds greatest creations. Almost as fundamental as the invention of the printing press. Why destroy that just because you want to make a buck?