Is Anything Wrong w/ the Cartio Micropayment System? 27
ballpeen asks: "Obviously it's not the lack of technology that's been holding up a decent micropayment system for years. But a few months back, I tried out the dummy account demo for the new Cartio set-up, and it seems fine. It's based out of the Netherlands, but fully international. Offers credit card, debit, personal check or cash fills. The s/w downloaded in a couple minutes (400K?), installed no problem on Win98, and seemed to work fine. It's made to handle online and offline purchases in the one-cent to 10 bucks range. Has anyone else checked this out? What's the hold-up?" Of course, this is currently Win32 only (a Mac version looks to be in the works). But the system seems sound enough. Might Cartio be the first to do micropayments right?
The problems I see.... (Score:2)
Next, from the merchants point of view, how much is this going to cost me to accept micropayments? Its free for buyers, but there must be fees for sellers. Their website doesn't happen to mention any of this. To me, that indicates that maybe it isn't all that great a deal.
micropayments are a nice idea, but I think that it will never work.
Re:The problems I see.... (Score:2, Interesting)
The site could spread content sparsely but one key point I forgot to mention about this scheme is that at the end of each month you would get a popup with a list of sites and number of hits in order to confirm payment. You could redistribute the payments and lower the offending sites that you believe abuse the scheme. There would be no monetary benefit to the user reducing payment maliciously as they are only changing the distribution and they lose the same amount each month regardless. While they punish one site another benefits. It wasn't mentioned but I think it would be useful to have a suggestion box beside each site in the list, so you could explain why you did what you did. Anonymously, of course.
All payments (all companies) have a break-even point. I'm not sure if there is a way around this.
I'd like an anonymous payment system but I don't want to be interupted. I don't want to subconsciously be valuing the content and I don't want to feel ripped off with poor content.
This scheme solves most of these problems. It's not perfect but it's certainly better than most.
I think this scheme solves most problems. Hmmm...
Re:The problems I see.... (Score:1)
Cartio is free to the user. No card fee, period. 1 cent to 10 dollars Euro/US more or less the same.
Click and go, basically.
Anonymous cash - true digital cash, untraceable - is the ideal. But the biggest hurdle is geing able to get real cash digital, after that, especially for microtransactions, I'm not worried about privacy. I don't have credit to steal. I can't be laundering money, unless it's some kid's stolen lunch money. So privacy is a luxury, when it comes to dealing with the credit card people, or not.
Re:The problems I see.... (Score:2, Informative)
This has nothing to do with Yahoo! and MSNBC, it's about individuals, the little guys, the indie labels, the tattoo artists, the lone filmmakers. And the kids with computers who can crank out a better 90 minute fx flick than hollywood, for a fraction of the cost, and just need to get paid.
1. Everyone does not have a credit card. US is, I think 60% penetration? World, 20%. Take out the maxed out, the non-users, the completely in another market, it's not many people. And who's the most likely audience for indie gear: sure some Blue Card yuppy hackers and graphic artists, but a lot more people with cash, no cards.
2. I ran an indie music site that got up to nearly a million page views a month, 20,000+ unique visits a week. On a $30 account - they lived up to their unlimited bandwidth claim - my time, a few other volunteers, and a ton of site posting activity. One or two columns, or charts, could easily have pulled in 10cents a view, racked up 1,000 views a day, $100, $700 a week. For a start, that pays my bills. Rent too. Hey, food also. Sure the big guys rack up the pennies like they always do - but now others can too.
3. If you looked, the free setup is 20% flat charge. Then 15% and 10% if you invest one time in programs at $8K and %28K. So my $700 is $560 pretax. Cost me nothing... 20% is relative - just fine if you get what you need, versus nothing.
I'll go away now.
My two cents . . . (Score:2, Interesting)
If you don't, stop and think and maybe you'll see why micropayments won't work.
Re:My two cents . . . (Score:2)
Re:My two cents . . . (Score:2)
None of the crap on the web is worth paying for. At the price of an ISP connection it's already a rip-off. When you loose anonymity or privacy in order to post, it can be an even worse deal. No one should ever pay even a 10,000th of a cent to read this post. If you think so, stop now, because I promise the rest of it isn't worth it.
Still here, eh ? Think of it like a party or a coffee house or a group of people waiting for the bus. You are willing to listen to a random person come up to and start talking. But when they come up to you with their hand out, it's "Sorry buddy, no spare change here." Communication with other humans instantly becomes degraded in status as soon as money is involved. The exceptions are narrow, such as hard core technical information or economic reports.
If slashdot or some other sites start implementing micropayments, there are two things that can happen:
1) if the system excludes those who are not signed up, then the sub-class of people who do post their will be the extremely annoying, self-important, whiny liberal types. Think of the The Well back in the day, or even to certain extent Kuro5hin today. Expect common posts to be along the lines of "Oh my god, I always listen to NPR, but on the way to work today I accidently hit the wrong button and ended up listening to [insert AM talk show host here], and I JUST CAN'T BELIEVE . . . ." Imagine a discussion board completely populated by people like Dave Winer [userland.com]. Expect threads to be along the lines of "all those other non-micropayment sites are filled with hateful, violent, ignorant, gun-toting arab-hating SUV-driving working class people. How can we enlightened micropayers spread the word ?"
2) If the system doesn't exclude people who don't sign up, and the fact that it has a such a system doesn't attract so many people like yourself that it falls into case 1 anyway, then it will be like slashdot except that a segment of the population has agreed to be ripped off. Eventually the ripped off segment will become disillusioned, because inspite of the fact that your paying nothing changes, and will either stop paying or go to site like case 1.
The very promise and hope of the internet is the free communication of all humans with each other. That's what makes it the internet, replete with everything from Dave Winer to goatse.cx and fecaljapan.jpg. If you are worried that there isn't a taxation system in place to pay you a few hundred dollars a month for bandwidth on your site, consider the possibility that humanity as a whole doesn't value your contributions enough to pay for them. There exist plenty of intellegent human beings who are willing to pay in time and even money just to publish and post, because they want people to read what they say and possibly change the world because of it.
After all, you read my post -- you just paid with two minutes of your life and you probably don't even agree with anything I say. Why should you have to pay anything, even a fraction of a cent, more ? I'm satisfied with the two minutes of your attention, and if this post goes in some small way to prevent idiots from investing time and money into a micropayment system doomed to fail as surely as etoys, SCO, and pets.com, then I've done my part to make the economy a bit more efficient.
Stop wanking off about money. It's not about money. That's why the dot-bombs bombed. It's about humans communicating.
Re:My two cents . . . (Score:1)
Still reading? Here's why (briefly!):
What most people don't understand is the full extent of CONTENT IS KING. The PERCEPTION is that "content" is good, or else you can call it junk. Little thought is given to the ways in which content is created. By the great tormented genius writer/painter/wanker cyberfi writer, whatever? By a collaborative group of artists and technicians and others, like on a movie? Sure. BUT, as was the case with zines - all indie media - and is accelerated online, EDITING can also be a completely freestanding form of "art", or "content creation". An Editor can be, though isn't necessarily, an artist, and there are lots of styles.
Take slasdot. It's pretty interesting, hardcore participation, and it relies on editing. Story submissions first by a smaller group of editors, then the karma points, by "the people" supported by democracyware - kinda like the jury system. But you're right - it's not even a 1-cent a post site. That doesn't make it bad...it's what it is, hopefully what it intended to be.
That's POINT #1: Volume of posting and popularity don't make "content" online, in the sense of what people will pay with. Traffic should be able to generate revenue other ways, but not always by content for sale.
But look at fuckedcompany. They're like slashdot with a sensationalistic theme. They charge now for most of the shit. I get pissed when I can't see the stuff. I won't subscribe...I haven't so far. But I don't click away not caring...I WANNA KNOW what those pay-to-view rumors are. The guy, Pud or whatever, is making out fine with pretty hefty subs, due to the insane corporate VC people and the remaining trendy ThinkGeek geeks with cash. But if a microcash system existed, and he couldn't charge his sub rates but had to go for pennies a rumor and I had a simple click-don't click 5-10-25 cent decision, like video games, I'd be a'clickin'.
What does that have to do with editing? The couple other dotcom bubble burst watch sites, urban expose and whatever, I once read, but probably wouldn't click to pay, or very seldom. Why? EDITING. An editor can be obvious, rewriting, doing the lead pieces, or pretty invisible, just tweaking the system, shaping the space. Fuckedcompany got the right balance, maybe he had a good inside crew to start, but a bunch of buddies doesn't hold stuff up. His flavor overall made it worth paying for.
Which is POINT#2: the light touch - a good feel for encouraging unknowns, noninvasive editing, just listening to the traffic and making mild adjustments, is a particularly online EDITOR AS CREATOR style. He's the guy the trad journalists were worried about without knowing it 10 years ago when they thought newspapers would go under 'cause everyone would be reporting online with windowfront view of every story in the world, real-time. But few of that editor class has emerged. They will. Hopefully before the Net gets strangled. Shaping a flow can create CONTENT.
So when you say, everything should be free, and I want to get a cheap ($300) Rackspace account, but that's a little stiff as a monthly donation from me to whoever reads whatever I put up...what's free?
By putting down the idea of payment - and this is only PRINT so far, there's music, artwork, services, endless stuff - you're helping do what the VC did: buried the spirit in cash. If I was a conspiracy theory guy, I'd say the dotcom boombust was a power elite nuclear strike: remember that Details/Conde Naste internal memo leaked: "We don't know what this digital thing is, but whatever it is, we can't let it leave us in the dust." What's a couple billion thrown at a bunch of unready crews if it means beating down a generation of indie Net producers. Financial napalm.
Short version: Quality by individual effort will rise anywhere but in a corporate world. And people know it. And given half a chance - like with a good micropayment system, like Cartio seems to be - they WILL pay.
Like I said in another post: haven't you ever taken great satisfaction in dropping a buck in the case of some guy busking in the subway 'cause he was just freakin' great! That's fair consumerism. Value for dollar.
Re:My two cents . . . (Score:2)
It will fail for the same reason that paying fees to download mp3's will fail -- people won't do it, and technology gives them another option. The infrastructure of any micropayment system will annoy enough people who are necessary to the survival of the site (as audience or creators/posters) that it will fail and the free sites, or usenet, will succeed.
Just because you think we all SHOULD reward those "busking" (is that what it's called ? those guys should be shot) subway artists or web posters doesn't mean we will. You might say "how will our culture survive?" or "without it the web will die!" or whatever, but it's like a little kid who doesn't believe in the speed of light because otherwise how will Capt. Kirk get the to the stars ? I don't know how humans will go to the stars or what type of net we will create, but micropayments will be a rare curiosity on it, and our spaceships will not go faster than light.
If you want to think of what the net will be like in 30 years, think of what the net was like in Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game. Remember how Demosthesenes who was really Ender's sister published all those political rants on the net and everyone read her work ? She didn't have to collect micropayments.
I think that in the near term, should web sites resort to micropayments, what will happen is people will write tools to automatically share their browser caches whenever possible and cut down on the hits to the web site enormously. The web site owner won't get enough money to pay for the trouble of setting up the payment system, but on the other hand he won't have the bandwidth bill either. And he will still have the social influence of writing (or editing) material that is read by a lot of people. This multitude of peer-to-peer caches might become pervasive. Look at how articles propagate through news servers.
The tools to do this sort of thing are there now, we just haven't been forced to use them yet. For example, I started work on a script to download the whole of the New York Times online every day and index and archive it so I wouldn't have to pay their archive fees (and so I could also have a better search engine than the one they use). But I also live in a university town where I can go to the library and print out the microfiche for 15 cents, and if I want an archived article that badly often I decide I want a copy of the print version in that format.
Whatever.
I'm about to travel for Thanksgiving and will be away from computers until this article is archived and dead on slashdot . . . but feel free to continue the discussion by sending me email to the rgristroph@yahoo.com address if you wish.
Re:My two cents . . . (Score:2)
In seriousness though: I'd pay a tiny bit to read slashdot, even with all the crap here -- and with the serious posts like yours which I happen to disagree with.
The point I think you're missing, though, is that I'm certainly not suggesting that the entire 'net should move to a micropayment system. There's no way I'd charge micropayments for my personal web site or for qru [quotes-r-us.org]. You're right -- it's *not* supposed to be all about the money -- but unfortunately a simple fact is that it costs money to run a web site, and there's nothing wrong with a mechanism to cover those costs. If there existed a good and reasonable (emphasis on reasonable) micropayment system, a lot of people would use it, and a lot of good sites would benefit.
Uhhh (Score:1)
Of course, this is currently Win32 only . . . Might Cartio be the first to do micropayments right?
What site is this again? Because I thought I was reading slashdot.org.
I think there's been some horrible mistake.
_Micro Payments Will Never Work_! (Score:1)
Re:_Micro Payments Will Never Work_! (Score:1)
>>These arguments run aground on the historical record. There have been a number of attempts to implement micropayments, and they have not caught on in even in a modest fashion - a partial list of floundering or failed systems includes FirstVirtual, Cybercoin, Millicent, Digicash, Internet Dollar, Pay2See, MicroMint and Cybercent. If there was going to be broad user support, we would have seen some glimmer of it by now.
Well, duh. All of the non-cash, or badly structured, failures. Credit cards by any other name. What do you expect? Historically, the rich have gotten richer, and the poor poorer. Your next article....
>>Users hate them.
Says you. Lemme talk to the users. Where's your quotes?
>>In particular, users want predictable and simple pricing. Micropayments, meanwhile, waste the users' mental effort in order to conserve cheap resources, by creating many tiny, unpredictable transactions.
I'm pasting quotes backward, but either direction, it's the same thing over and over. This is MICROpayments, not CAR payments. Who the f******** agonizes over spending a dime? And if you do get caught in inevitable scam sites, well, you move to hell along. You want to find the cool shit, and support it. With your quarter. Ever tossed a buck, with such satisfaction, in a subway busker's case? That's spontaneious micropayment, natural as hell.
>>Thus the anxiety of buying is a permanent feature of micropayment systems, since economic decisions are made on the margin - not, "Is a drink worth a dollar?" but, "Is the next drink worth the next dollar?" Anything that requires the user to approve a transaction creates this anxiety, no matter what the mechanism for deciding or paying is.
BS. Credit card mentality. Amusement parks should stop selling parkwide tickets -they don't work (maybe they have, evil bastards). SEE BELOW.
>>The desired state for micropayments - "Get the user to authorize payment without creating any overhead" - can thus never be achieved, because the anxiety of decision making creates overhead. No matter how simple the interface is, there will always be transactions too small to be worth the hassle.
Again, CREDIT CARDS AND DIRECT DEBITS 'cause anxiety. When was the decision anxiety so great about where to plug quarters in a video arcade, or looking over a candy bar rack. When you know what you have, you're fine.
>>Micropayment advocates mistakenly believe that efficient allocation of resources is the purpose of markets. The reasons markets work are not because users have embraced efficiency but because markets are the best place to allow users to maximize their preferences, and very often their preferences are not for conservation of cheap resources.
Sounds like he's talking about the idiots who DON'T get micropayment no matter how hard they try, than consumer behavior. Yeah, users do want to maximize their preferences, like being able to get stuff not produced by AOLTW, no matter how cheap. Who's talking about "conserving cheap resources", it's about people paying what they can afford, to people who those amounts make a difference, 'cause there's no train of middlemen.
>>the real world abounds with items of vanishingly small value: a single stick of gum, a single newspaper article, a single day's rent. There are three principal solutions to this problem offline - aggregation, subscription, and subsidy - that are used individually or in combination.
This the WTO model: break down decision barriers between individuals, meld minds, mandate group behavior, toss 'em a bone. I wanna pay a guy a nickel for his cool underground strip. Period. I don't want to card it, I certainly don't want to accomplish this via aggregation, subscription, and a subsidy....
Did you read this article, or just the subheads? No wonder I got such a bad attitude sitting on panels with experts.
WOW, no wonder. But it's mostly that Anon Coward (Score:2, Interesting)
What a bunch of clueless comments. Just bait, right?
Micropayments are the missing link in any sort of indie Net movement. Most of the creatives - artists, programmers - and the smaller and mid-size companies that would support 'em, got beat right down, financially and emotionally, with the dotcom fiasco. What a cheap way to kill the street competition and a new freak medium - smothering with cash works just as well as a plastic bag over the head!
Meanwhile, the ONE clear thing about the Net threat to the Establishment since '95-'96 WAS that micorpayments, done right, could provide real people the missing economic link to make the Net work for them.
Not freakin' credit card-based crap (ccard penetration outside the US is around 20%, and Americans are long since maxed out). Not even debit cards. You want a kid to be able to scrounge a fiver, take it to the 7-11, shove it in a machine, get a card like a subway card or library card or discount phone card, go home, start surfin' and be able to click and pay, dime here, nickel there, a buck for a pretty heavily compressed indie track (two bucks for a fatter file)... A little hard manga past that over 13? sign...
It's classic human consumer nature. The old candy store and what do you do with that quarter or buck. Jawbreaker, licorice, y'know... THAT'S A FAIR DISCRETIONARY BUYING SET-UP: lotsa instagratification choice, priced so you can both browse and buy.
Forget the anonymous cash aspect, take just the CASH aspect. All previous micro systems were tied to plastic - very limiting to the audience, by the mindset alone - and then to the increasingly-proven-evil debit mode (you can't really get debits to stop).
A GOOD micropayment system lets indie artists draw comics, bands and labels release tracks, every funny or fanatical freak who can type churn out fiction, reportage, lyrics, people create jewellery, put up friggin' FRACTALS for sale. No limits.
They tried that at the portals, The Globe, at least, others? Open a mini store. Or ebay. But these are different animals, CREDIT CARD secured. PayPal's hardly better.
If Cartio delivers invoice and personal check/money order fill options, THAT'S a revolution. Not only don't a ton of people have cards, or cards with anything left, people HATE them deep down. Spending cash is real.
As for usage: the click to far syndrome's spreading, slightly sneaker than in the XXX world. Been to Salon lately. Click a juicy headline. Start reading a couple paras. Suddenly: PREMIUM CONTENT, DUDE, SUB HERE. Even fuckedcompany is subscription: click too far and it's login or pay time. Papers like Variety, hardcore trades, the NY Times, etc have been doing that for a while, a teaser regular page with headlines and leads, then click a story and it's the subscriber page! Variety [variety.com] is a classic - try reading a juicy story.
And that's subs for $10-20-30+ a year, or even a month. Take DJ culture instead, it supports the talented quite well thanks, by NOT supporting the vast infrastructural overhead of a major label, or other big corp. Stay real, and charge reasonable, and you end up with more in your pocket than signing that big corporate contract to do whatever.
And people LIKE to pay, when they feel the payment is going direct. Buying with a card from a middleman is wack. Cracking Adobe software is cold. But sending three bucks to U-Turn records DIRECT may be questionable, but if you wanna do it, it's not less money for you, it's satisfaction!
Good micropayment is the lemonade stand. It's Tom Sawyer whitewashing the wall... It's FREE ENTERPRISE...everyone can play, and pay to play as well.
You did actually know this, right? Just teasing me?
Slashdot hypocrisy emerges... (Score:3, Interesting)
Micropayments sound like a great idea -- for some lameass that spends thousands of dollars running a free website (with no chance of making a buck) with money taken from gullible investors. After all, it's a chance to sell your "content" instead of giving it away.
People will pay for websites -- namely porn (through subscriptions), technical information (through service contracts) and special refrence collections (medical, engineering, marketing, etc) via subscription. Very few people would ever pay for a run-of-the-mill website like Slashdot, however, because there is no compelling reason to do so.
The only reason people go to websites like this one is the large number of people who tend to congregate there. Some are pretty smart, some amusing, others obnoxious. Require payments and you will rapidly see the quantity and diversity of comments drop dramaticaly.
I am convinced that the only way that high-traffic websites where vistors stay for long periods of time or visit often (ie sites like Slashdot, Fuckedcompany and gamer sites) can survive is through brand advertising.
A combination of text and graphical ads need to be used in a manner similar to newspaper or radio spots. Get rid of those retarded banner ads that nobody ever clicks and use larger, more entertaining or catchy graphics. Make ads informative. Sell ads that create a mood rather than count clicks. Run classifieds ala Popular Mechanics magazine. Be creative.
Re:Slashdot hypocrisy emerges... (Score:2)
People *like* to pay for good sites that have good content.
I think micropayments would work, too, but $0.01/page is *way* too large -- it should be a tenth of that or less. And of course, it has to be cross-platform and vendor-independent, or else we're back to the days of Compu$erve.
Some offtopic flamebait (I can spare the karma) (Score:2)
For your information, many serious Slashdoter are not Free Software zealots. I myself have always seen the Free Software Foundation as a haven for people who can't cope with economic reality outside an MIT dorm.
(Which is not to say that FSF and Project GNU haven't accomplished anything. Mainly they've given us the "Open Source" development model. Despite its silly ideological origins, Open Source is a viable alternative to the design-by-comittee methodology that used to prevail. Which is why KDE and GNOME have made more progress in a few years than CDE has made in over a decade. But I digress.)
I value Slashdot because it's a gathering place for people involved in the cutting edge of technology. Many have silly ideas about how the world works, but hey, they're hardly unusual in that respect! Naturally there are a lot of people who are into Open Source -- because a lot of important work is being done there.
This is a place to share ideas. That assumes a certain degree of respect for those you disagree with. If you have honest opinions, let's hear them. But if you just want to spout bigoted insults, go call Rush or Dr. Laura. They actually want to hear from you.
Re:Some offtopic flamebait (I can spare the karma) (Score:2)
Slashdot is like interactive TV. Topics move by so quickly, serious or informed discussion is impossible. And if someone tries to have a discussion, it is quickly squelched by a flurry of -1 Flamebait/Overrated/Offtopic moderations. This is not a site for creative and/or intelligent discussion. More like a bunch of bored college students goofing off in class and a few sysadmins.
I value this site because they have a unique mixture of news, and for the Ask Slashdot/Developer sections, where the people you describe generally hide out.
I'm not God, therefore Slashdot sucks. (Score:2)
What are the issues? (Score:2)
Look, this not a radical concept. Most of the growth of the internet is fueled by commerce, and you can't have commerce without a medium of exchange. So far we've piggybacked the credit-card system, but that's got serious drawbacks, such as fraud, overhead (the fees the banks get for these transactions are absurd), the sheer complexity of making a transfer, and the inability to handle small transactions.
(Paypal and its competitors are a slight improvement, mainly because they make the system accessible to people who can't get credit card merchant accounts. But they're still part of the system, and suffer from most of its limitations.)
I can go to a book or magazine store and buy all kinds of content for prices as small as a few dollars. (As small as 25 cents, if you count advertising-subsidized content.) Why can't I do the same thing online? Why is content pricing actually less flexible online? Why can't I read just one article in the Wall Street Journal without paying for a whole newstand copy -- or subscribing to their whole web site for a monthly fee?
I understand (though I do not accept) why the electronic version of the latest bestseller actually costs more than the hard copy version. (The technical term is "canibalizing your existing market".) But why can't I pay some struggling writer to read his work online? Even if I only give him a few cents, that's more than he'd get otherwise -- and possibly as much as he'd get from a "real" publisher!
The answer is simple: I can't do these things because there's no transaction system in place. Maybe Cartio and Millicent are not the answer, but nobody seems to have an informed opinion as to why.
Re:What are the issues? (Score:1)
If you're interested, just look at the other ballpeen replies in the topic.
The short version BEFORE this slashdot post (which I started): Obviously, large business interests have no...interest in seeing a cash-based system work. Credit card, and even direct debit, suck, for various reasons, a major one being, not THAT many people and not necessarily the people who would be a significant market for indie microcost products, have cards, or want to use them, or have anything left on them.
The short(ish) version after reading the comments here: It's the rebel-without-a-clue GEEKS who may've had as big a hand in this as any loose conspiracy of big business interests. As you, the tiny minority, noticed, this is a shocking array of lame answers from people who you'd think could see beyond paying for National Enquirer Online's daily horoscope, or whatever, to the freedom it would bring to indie producers: writers, musicians, artists, the possibilities are endless.
Forget anonymous cash, just get CASH-based micropayment online and see what happens!
As I said also in another rant: It's like the lemonade stand. Like Tom Sawyer whitewashing the wall... Micropayments accessible to ANYONE with cash is the true spirit of free market action. Like dropping a buck in a buskers hat 'cause he played a fine tune. Value for dollar.
(I feel like an activist now. Can't remember when I used the same examples, words, rhetoric, whatever, more than once in the same place...)
Why *any* micropayment system is DOA (Score:1)