The Case For Micropayments

During working hours, it is easy to calculate the value of a user’s time. If we assume that various overhead costs  are about the same as a person’s salary, then somebody making $35,000 per year costs their company a cent per second. In other words, every time you access a Web page, it costs your company ten cents just for having you sit and wait while it downloads (assuming that the page design obeys the 10-second response time limit). Add time to actually read the page, and we are looking at a cost of 25 cents to a dollar every time an employee accesses a Web page (with proportionally larger costs for highly-paid staff). In this context, paying a cent (or a few cents) for the content is nothing if it ensures higher-quality pages.

Often, businesses wish to sell information and other abstract items for small sums. The challenges for e-commerce businesses, however, are to keep transaction expenses to a minimum. I predict that most sites that are not financed through traditional product sales will move to micropayments in less than two years.

Similar apps with zero fee for small instant private transactions, Vipps and MobilePay have become popular in Norway and Denmark. MySuperLedger aims to equip SMEs with the capability to handle super large accounting volume which usually internet giants such as Alipay, WeChat Pay, PayPal have. Micro- +‎ payment, attributed to American information technologist, philosopher, and sociologist Ted Nelson.

The service provider would access the wallet and send it to the concerned parties. Ted Nelson first used the term micropayment long before the invention of the internet and WWW (World Wide Web). Initially, people used the terms for low-cost copyrights holders. After the invention of the internet, many people use a micropayment system to sell their content online. see this here https://saypaytechnologies.com/.

Unless the entire industry moves to micropayments in one fell swoop, there will always be somewhere to get content for free. Without locking them into a subscription, it’ll be a constant challenge for publishers to prove their worth to readers. With this type of set-up, users create an account with the processor and can top up their funds whenever they like. PayPal is a prime example of this type of system, used by both merchants and consumers who complete a transaction through the same account. The customer tops up their PayPal account, which they can use to make a purchase from an ecommerce business. The funds are debited from the user’s personal PayPal account and credited into the merchant’s business PayPal account.

Thus, the site never gets visited by the user; it also never gets the chance to prove its value to that user and convert him or her into a loyal, repeat visitor. Of course, with just one year’s worth of data and only Dutch and German publications featured, it’s a bit early to predict the success of Blendle on a global scale. However, with early promising data and upcoming access to The New York Times, Economist, The Wall Street Journal and several Conde Nast magazines, this micropayment experiment will be one to watch.

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