| |
Although micropayment is a great thing in principle, existing implementations contain big problems which block their success. This article analyzes these problems and proposes a new solution without them. The solution lacks most traditional spending features, but still preserves the "spirit of micropayment".
|
 | The spirit of micropayment
While "micropayment" refers to a broad field of services covering everything from payments for small physical goods to remote disk space, the usage that always catched peoples' imagination best is payments for internet pages. The idea is that if all visitors to a popular website only pay the site a small amount which don't hurt them, the website could earn an enormous sum because the number of visitors is so big.
Example: If the website of a self-publishing author would be visited by 30,000 people monthly, and every visitor paid the site just 20¢, the author would earn $6,000 every month. Read more about micropayment advantages in this article by Scott McCloud.
|
| | Problems
Micropayment has problems, though. Two informative articles about this have been written by Clay Shirky and Sean Barrett. Their arguments boil down to 3 systematic micropayment problems:
|
| 1. | Prices are too small to be compared to known goods
Newspaper print editions typically cost between 60¢ and $1. When bringing a newspaper online and making it accessible through micropayment, a publisher would probably price every article at 1¢ or 2¢. This fee however is too small for users to decide whether an article is worth its price, because there are no other goods in the same price range that users can compare the fee to. |
|
| 2. | Users don't want to deal with micropayment decision-making
Users will always spend some time deciding whether they want to pay money visiting a page. They need to decide this before actually seeing a page, which makes deciding even more complicated. But worst of all, users need to do this process over and over again for every page they want to see, using up time that users don't want to spend. |
|
| 3. | Need for altering browsers
Proposed micropayment systems all require browsers are updated. The alterations would display a taximeter so that users can always see how much money they have spent this month, would show them the price before they click a link and handle all payments in the background. Writing these updates for every browser takes an incredible effort, and asking every internet user to install the alteration is nearly impossible. |
|
 | Proposed new solution
The proposed solution centers around creating a single flat rate subscription system that allows access to a big number of websites.
|
| • | To reach that size, publisher sign-up is easy, automated and free, and there are no editorial guidelines. |
|
| • | Distribution of subscription fees is done in a fair manner: the money of each subscriber is distributed evenly to all of his visited pages, ensuring that even small sites receive their legitimate share from every visitor to their site. |
|
| • | The solution is completely web standards based, using just the basic browser features cookie and http-redirect. This ensures compatibility with every major browser down to Netscape 1.0. |
|
| | Comparing problems and proposed solution
Let's see how well the proposed idea solves existing micropayment problems:
|
| 1. | "Prices are too small to be compared to known goods"
In the solution, users don't need to compare prices before visiting a page, since visiting any page is free after the initial subscription fee is paid. Subscription price are $3 to $10 / month, which are values all people can relate to. |
|
| 2. | "Users don't want to deal with micropayment decision-making"
They don't have to. After the subscription is bought, visiting pages doesn't cost any additional money. |
|
| 3. | "Need for altering browsers"
There's no need for a taximeter because it's a flat fee. Prices don't need to be displayed because no decision has to be made. And everything else uses standard features compatible with every browser. |
|
So the problems are all solved. Clay Shirky and Sean Barrett had further concerns in their articles. If you're interested, read our thoughts about them here.
|
 | Comparing proposed solution and the spirit of micropayment
Now let's find out if the proposed solution realizes micropayment's spirit:
|
| • | "Visitors only pay a small amount which doesn't hurt them"
True. The payment is not 1¢ but $3 to $10 / month, however since it's a flat fee to access many websites, the payment doesn't hurt much. |
|
| • | "Amount for distribution is usefully big"
Since the amount for distribution gets smaller the more pages are visited, this is a question of how many pages the average visitor views during one month. |
|
| | • | Monthly fee is $10 after introductory months are over. With $10 (of which $9 are distributed) a subscriber can visit 900 pages and each page still gets 1¢. |
|
| | • | During introductory months the fee is $3, but there aren't a lot of sites to surf to yet, so the average subscriber possibly only visits 150 pages, which means that each page gets even more than 1¢. |
|
| | • | Subscribers don't have unlimited time, so they won't visit huge sums of pages. |
|
| | Since these examples are already a bit on the extreme side, we believe it's save to say that even when distributing a flat fee, visited sites still receive a usably big sum. Depending on user behavior, about 1¢ or more can be expected on average for every visited page. |
|
| • | "Distribution allows popular sites to earn enormous sums"
For our example with the self-publishing author to come true, the author needs 20¢ from every visitor, so the average visitor needs to view 20 pages on the author's site during a month. Possible examples: |
|
| | • | If he creates daily comics, average users revisit his site 20 times a month. |
|
| | • | If he creates other artwork, average visitors view 20 pages containing his art, annotations, drafts and ideas, open diary entries or reviews of other artists. |
|
| | • | If he writes books, it's enough if every 10th visitor reads a book of 200 pages. |
|
| | These requirements are not too big, so it is a goal that can be achieved. |
|
| | What's so cool about this approach
The way the money is distributed means that if a website is good, the user might access many pages on this site and the site gets a big share of the money the user paid at the beginning. If a site is not so good, he might visit only one page and the site gets only little money. And people talk to each other and tell each other the cool pages (using email, weblogs and other ways), so that a really good page gets many hits from many people and automatically gets a lot of money from all these users. So this is completely self-organizing: Better pages get more money.
And it's also extremely attractive to users: They see that they can access so many different sites for a flat fee, so they are very likely to sign up. Of course they don't have time to visit all sites, but it feels great to say "there are all these sites that are valuable and cool, and I could just access them if I wanted to".
On the other hand, as soon as there are some subscribers, it's also attractive to the publishers: A new publisher can set up a site, and all people that already have a subscription can go to the site and with just 1 click, they immediately see the page and pay the publisher. No boring forms to fill out, but instant satisfaction for both parties!
|
 | So, in closing, we believe the proposed solution can indeed realize the spirit of micropayment without its traditionally attached problems and bring us new, prosperous online content creators.
If this article has inspired you, take a look at the rest of this website: Ipaya is the realization of the ideas presented here. Home
|
