
Micro-payments considered for WSJ website - rms
http://www.google.com/url?q=http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/afcc5024-3d97-11de-a85e-00144feabdc0.html
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markbao
This is a step in the right direction. They have to make it easy enough and
cheap enough yet profitable enough.

It's like a previous discussion on ebooks: for intellecutal content, hit the
spot where people want to pay money for it, but think it's cheap enough to
just throw a bit of money at it.

 _Case in point_ : I don't care if I have to pay 10 cents to view an article.
10 cents is nothing to me. The content and satisfaction of curiosity (given an
excerpt, of course) is worth it.

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w1ntermute
The most difficult problem to solve is the method of payment. Just the fact
that one has to enter his/her credit card (or other form of payment)
information is going to be an enormous deterrent. I just don't know if there's
a good enough mechanism in place for micro-payments to be practical.

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markbao
I agree. I'm dealing with the same problem in one of my startups too, which
deals with consumer micropayments as well.

I think Tipjoy is taking a step in the right direction; the problem is just
payment fulfillment. And without a ubiquitous micropayments provider that has
access to a lot of people's credit cards (like PayPal?) it's always going to
be an unfortunate obstacle.

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seertaak
I think the answer already exists, to some extent: it is iTunes. In my
opinion, iTunes solves the problem of multiple card detail entry. You enter
your details once, and from that point on a single click buys you whatever you
want. Anyone who's used iTunes for any period of time knows how addictive it
can get.

In other words, a closed application in which you login to some centralized
repository. On that repository you can efficiently search all the content
available. Because you log in that the start, any purchases require only a
single click. It is easy to implement package deals in this way also.

The browser can be made to use standard HTML so that content creators don't
need to anything radically different from standard web solutions (i.e. make
the browser have WebKit built in).

Can anyone think of what's wrong with this method?

There is another, more nefarious advantage. If the dominating content
companies want to stick it to Google (which, given Google's behaviour towards
them, wouldn't be all that surprising), they can allow their content to be
searchable on Windows Live or alternatives, and not on Google. Then, for the
first time, Google's service would actually be worse than its competitors'.

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rms
Redirect to get around cookie/registrationwall. (Thanks nickb:
<http://www.newmogul.com/item?id=9837>)

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pie
It will be interesting to see the adoption rate of this micropayment system
among casual readers. It's likely that serious "business users" will stick
with the full-service subscription packages and ignore more complex payment
systems, as they do now with news analysis and research services.

In the end, we're probably still waiting for the "killer app" (or adoption
thereof) at the center of casual payments.

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mahmud
Tipjoy!

