Slashdot | Micropayments: Effective Replacement For Ads Or ?
http://slashdot.org/articles/01/02/26/1756207.shtml -- The Laws of Serendipity: 1. In order to discover anything, you must be looking for something. 2. If you wish to make an improved product, you must first be engaged in making an inferior one. Tivoli Certification Group, OSCT James Choate jchoate@tivoli.com Senior Engineer 512-436-1062
I don't think micropayments are going to work in anything like their present form. I do not want to be pestered about "is it okay to spend half a cent on X?" or "Subscriptions to Y cost only $12 a year" kind of stuff. That's too much cognitive overload. If they can fix micropayments so that I can authorize my web agent to spend up to $5 a month and not pester me about it, they might have something I'd use. But the whole "not pester" thing is at odds with what a lot of sites want to accomplish. For example, a web agent that was only authorized to spend five bucks a month would regard any site containing links that cost more than a penny as too expensive a place to be - and after it discovered this, I'd want it to reformat pages returned from search engines etc to de-emphasize those links and the text about the site. If the agent thinks it's too expensive, it sure as hell shouldn't be on the first page of search results - at least not the first page of search results the agent shows me. Conversely, if the web agent is not authorized to spend money, then sites supported by micropayments ought to be cut completely out of search engine results, and links to them found elsewhere ought to behave as "dead links" as far as my browser is concerned. I never EVER want to have to remember a username and password for a site supported by micropayments -- again, the cognitive load is too high for the piffling amounts we're talking about. My web agent ought to keep me informed about which of my online habits are expensive and in what degree - but that's maybe a trailing-two-weeks summary about how the budgeted money is being spent, not an "okay to spend half a penny?" dialog every ten seconds on the site. Finally, sites supported by micropayments are going to have to figure out something about web spiders. If "scooter" can't spend several million dollars a month on these places, they're not going to get into the altavista database, for example. So if you want the site to be in a search engine at all, you're going to have to let the search engine's robot cruise the site for free. Wanna bet it would be about twenty seconds before somebody released a "Pretend to be a web spider and browse pay sites for FREE!" utility? Bear
At 2:57 PM -0800 2/26/01, Ray Dillinger wrote:
If they can fix micropayments so that I can authorize my web agent to spend up to $5 a month and not pester me about it, they might have something I'd use.
Most people will skip any sites that cost money...unless, maybe, it's a porn site that they specifically want. There are very, very few pay sites which are surviving, let alone thriving. The "10 cents to read this dumb page" model is likely to fail. What I think, or what we think, doesn't make it so. But Cypherpunks should certainly not think of these kinds of micropayments as the holy grail for digital money. This said, there may someday be _novel_ micropayment applications. Some think newspaper subscriptions (with more or less true representations of page layouts, as a couple of newspapers are proposing) will be this application. I suspect not.
My web agent ought to keep me informed about which of my online habits are expensive and in what degree - but that's maybe a trailing-two-weeks summary about how the budgeted money is being spent, not an "okay to spend half a penny?" dialog every ten seconds on the site.
And there will likely be scams whereby tens of millions of Web surfers find out "two trailing weeks later" that they paid some money for something they didn't want, as when they were redirected to some page and charged automatically before they even knew they were there. Even with limits on payments--to stop the $135.87 "fee" for landing on www.sexyfun.com by accident or by redirection--there will be angles for grifters and cons to exploit anytime an automated "don't bother me with petty charges" system is used. Maybe something like a token dispenser radio button. When a page comes up, one "feeds tokens in." There are a few obvious candidates for "minipayments": software downloads (shareware or commercial), songs and music in some post-Napster world, etc.
Finally, sites supported by micropayments are going to have to figure out something about web spiders. If "scooter" can't spend several million dollars a month on these places, they're not going to get into the altavista database, for example. So if you want the site to be in a search engine at all, you're going to have to let the search engine's robot cruise the site for free. Wanna bet it would be about twenty seconds before somebody released a "Pretend to be a web spider and browse pay sites for FREE!" utility?
One obvious solution: certificates. Google and Alta Vista get "free passes." Nothing new in this. Like reporters being comped to a conference. --Tim May -- Timothy C. May tcmay@got.net Corralitos, California Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns
-- At 02:57 PM 2/26/2001 -0800, Ray Dillinger wrote:
Finally, sites supported by micropayments are going to have to figure out something about web spiders. If "scooter" can't spend several million dollars a month on these places, they're not going to get into the altavista database, for example. So if you want the site to be in a search engine at all, you're going to have to let the search engine's robot cruise the site for free. Wanna bet it would be about twenty seconds before somebody released a "Pretend to be a web spider and browse pay sites for FREE!" utility?
Not a problem. Typically a micropayment site will have index and summary pages that are free, and these free pages will contain lots of pay links. You will not want the spider to traverse the pay links. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG E50EWZ3DbSA4I1elfY6ZL3m256NEr50epMUkMMvK 43w6FHlI8HTFJ2mODNAVwTRsFWtqomg18OkMhSMaj
If we get to the situation where ISPs want people to use their bandwidth because they're getting paid for it, it makes sense for the ISP to give a kick back to the person who hosted the data or was involved in the chain which caused the user to reach that content. We already have many cable subscribers using capped flat-rate services, where there are charges over the capped limit. However I think these caps are typically intended to strongly discourage going over the cap (at least the it would seem so from the charges they levy over the 4GB download cap in my case). I'm not sure of the trends, or the long term outcome but if we do get to the case were people are more metered for service, something useful could be done with strongly anonymous ecash micropayments: the ISPs could pay their network connections to other ISPs per Megabyte. Then as an aspiring content pimp the current day warez, video and music traders could migrate to making big bucks by giving people what they want. The smart content authors / providers would compete. The dumb ones would try to outlaw such things and hopefully lose rather than turning the world into the draconian place it would have to be for their full intent in drafting the DMCA and WIPO offenses. Whether or not artists get money for the works they release depends on how badly people want to pay the lowest price for their content. It's a market fought on price vs availability, scalability (to handle flash crowds), and convenience. Some vendors may offer the claim or proof that they pay some percentage to the author, some may not. The market will decide. The author or original distributer of content chooses his parameters (requested proportion of content redistribution bandwidth costs) to optimise his profits. If he sets it too high, people will have the incentive to save a few cents getting it from warez.com; if he sets it low enough it will be below the threshold for which people are willing to search harder. Adam On Mon, Feb 26, 2001 at 10:32:05PM -0800, Tim May wrote:
At 2:57 PM -0800 2/26/01, Ray Dillinger wrote:
If they can fix micropayments so that I can authorize my web agent to spend up to $5 a month and not pester me about it, they might have something I'd use.
Most people will skip any sites that cost money...unless, maybe, it's a porn site that they specifically want.
There are very, very few pay sites which are surviving, let alone thriving.
The "10 cents to read this dumb page" model is likely to fail.
What I think, or what we think, doesn't make it so. But Cypherpunks should certainly not think of these kinds of micropayments as the holy grail for digital money.
This said, there may someday be _novel_ micropayment applications. Some think newspaper subscriptions (with more or less true representations of page layouts, as a couple of newspapers are proposing) will be this application. I suspect not.
My web agent ought to keep me informed about which of my online habits are expensive and in what degree - but that's maybe a trailing-two-weeks summary about how the budgeted money is being spent, not an "okay to spend half a penny?" dialog every ten seconds on the site.
And there will likely be scams whereby tens of millions of Web surfers find out "two trailing weeks later" that they paid some money for something they didn't want, as when they were redirected to some page and charged automatically before they even knew they were there.
Even with limits on payments--to stop the $135.87 "fee" for landing on www.sexyfun.com by accident or by redirection--there will be angles for grifters and cons to exploit anytime an automated "don't bother me with petty charges" system is used.
Maybe something like a token dispenser radio button. When a page comes up, one "feeds tokens in."
There are a few obvious candidates for "minipayments": software downloads (shareware or commercial), songs and music in some post-Napster world, etc.
"James A. Donald" wrote:
-- At 02:57 PM 2/26/2001 -0800, Ray Dillinger wrote:
Finally, sites supported by micropayments are going to have to figure out something about web spiders. If "scooter" can't spend several million dollars a month on these places, they're not going to get into the altavista database, for example. So if you want the site to be in a search engine at all, you're going to have to let the search engine's robot cruise the site for free. Wanna bet it would be about twenty seconds before somebody released a "Pretend to be a web spider and browse pay sites for FREE!" utility?
Not a problem. Typically a micropayment site will have index and summary pages that are free, and these free pages will contain lots of pay links. You will not want the spider to traverse the pay links.
Or you make the pay for pages be error pages in the body with keywords of the contents. That way, say your bot hits an article about squirrel mating habbits, in the body, you hide the keywords of that article (in comments, or in a 0 point font, or in black on black text, or in the header, etc.), so that bot can add them to it's corpus and get you the results on a search, but the HTML displays a sign up page. It won't get you results on specific phrases, but the keywords will get you the results you need. Pretty easy to do with CGI's. So when someone goes to google.com and gets results on that pay-for-access page, even if they hit the "cached page" page, they'll see the pay-for-access to this article, if they want to get it, they pay their $0.005 or whatever micropayment, and it's done. This assumes that the micropayment per content view model will work. Having worked at a big 800lbs gorrilla pay-for web site in the past, I can tell you it's not likely to work. 99% of the audience will not pay for the article - they'll just go elsewhere for similar info. That 1% that is conducting commercial research will pay even as much as $500 per page if the data is complete. As an example, once a year, the said co put out a list of info about other companies. The same list was published on paper for under $5 about a month later. We had quite a few purchases for this list, some were two people from the same company purchasing the list. Of course anyone with a scanner and good OCR software would have it for $5, but it goes to show you micropayments aren't the way to go. Macro payments are. -- ----------------------Kaos-Keraunos-Kybernetos--------------------------- + ^ + :Surveillance cameras|Passwords are like underwear. You don't /|\ \|/ :aren't security. A |share them, you don't hang them on your/\|/\ <--*-->:camera won't stop a |monitor, or under your keyboard, you \/|\/ /|\ :masked killer, but |don't email them, or put them on a web \|/ + v + :will violate privacy|site, and you must change them very often. --------_sunder_@_sunder_._net_------- http://www.sunder.net ------------
On Mon, 26 Feb 2001, Tim May wrote:
At 2:57 PM -0800 2/26/01, Ray Dillinger wrote:
If they can fix micropayments so that I can authorize my web agent to spend up to $5 a month and not pester me about it, they might have something I'd use.
Most people will skip any sites that cost money...unless, maybe, it's a porn site that they specifically want.
There are very, very few pay sites which are surviving, let alone thriving.
Right. All the "content-for-pay" artists now have to compete against all the unpaid amateurs who are webpublishing because webpublishing is easy and nearly free. Unless they can provide content that is absolutely above and beyond what the amateurs can do technologically and artistically, they are going to discover that there is no paying market for their stuff.
My web agent ought to keep me informed about which of my online habits are expensive and in what degree - but that's maybe a trailing-two-weeks summary about how the budgeted money is being spent, not an "okay to spend half a penny?" dialog every ten seconds on the site.
And there will likely be scams whereby tens of millions of Web surfers find out "two trailing weeks later" that they paid some money for something they didn't want, as when they were redirected to some page and charged automatically before they even knew they were there.
Right. And that's when they learn something they did was expensive and not to do that again. As long as the web agent can keep it under the budgeted amount, a few mistakes (and even a few scams) can be tolerated. The race would be between people trying to build smarter web agents (popping up and saying, "Hey boss, this link's always been free before, but now it costs a buck -- are you sure you want to go there?") and finding more subtle ways to try and rip them off. Beyond a certain level of subtlety, ripping people off is known as "marketing," and considered a non-problem.
Even with limits on payments--to stop the $135.87 "fee" for landing on www.sexyfun.com by accident or by redirection--there will be angles for grifters and cons to exploit anytime an automated "don't bother me with petty charges" system is used.
Absolutely. There are angles for grifters and cons to exploit in every market where money changes hands. Bear
At 11:29 AM -0800 2/27/01, Ray Dillinger wrote:
On Mon, 26 Feb 2001, Tim May wrote:
At 2:57 PM -0800 2/26/01, Ray Dillinger wrote:
If they can fix micropayments so that I can authorize my web agent to spend up to $5 a month and not pester me about it, they might have something I'd use.
Most people will skip any sites that cost money...unless, maybe, it's a porn site that they specifically want.
There are very, very few pay sites which are surviving, let alone thriving.
Right. All the "content-for-pay" artists now have to compete against all the unpaid amateurs who are webpublishing because webpublishing is easy and nearly free.
Or because "information wants to be free" (*) and _someone_ will make the songs or images or whatever available for absolutely nothing. Good examples of this are Napster, of course, and the alt.binaries.erotica.* Usenet newsgroups. (* I never particularly liked the "information wants to be free" slogan, for various reasons. See the archives for discussions.)
Unless they can provide content that is absolutely above and beyond what the amateurs can do technologically and artistically, they are going to discover that there is no paying market for their stuff.
Probably not even then. Unless the Net is heavily censored and encryption is banned, there are just too many "degrees of freedom" for the above-mentioned "information wants to be free" point to be invalidated. The cases of Mojo, Gnutella, Freenet, and free versions of Napster make this point. (Though the automated thievery, er, "sharing," of Napster made it trivial to install for even 6th graders, and thus led to the tens of millions of users, it is likely that future systems will still be used by many even if not so easy to "click and steal.") --Tim May -- Timothy C. May tcmay@got.net Corralitos, California Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns
On Mon, 26 Feb 2001, James A. Donald wrote:
Not a problem. Typically a micropayment site will have index and summary pages that are free, and these free pages will contain lots of pay links. You will not want the spider to traverse the pay links.
Plus, in a world of working metadata standards and heavy pay-per-view, the site will just self-spider and submit. Mutual benefit. The only problem is when sites cheat, and that could be solved in a number of ways. Sampo Syreeni <decoy@iki.fi>, aka decoy, student/math/Helsinki university
On Tue, 27 Feb 2001, Tim May wrote:
Right. All the "content-for-pay" artists now have to compete against all the unpaid amateurs who are webpublishing because webpublishing is easy and nearly free.
Or because "information wants to be free" (*) and _someone_ will make the songs or images or whatever available for absolutely nothing. Good examples of this are Napster, of course, and the alt.binaries.erotica.* Usenet newsgroups.
"Information *actually* wants to be tied up and spanked." alan@ctrl-alt-del.com | Note to AOL users: for a quick shortcut to reply Alan Olsen | to my mail, just hit the ctrl, alt and del keys. "In the future, everything will have its 15 minutes of blame."
On Tue, 27 Feb 2001, Alan Olsen wrote:
"Information *actually* wants to be tied up and spanked."
No, it wants to do the spanking. ____________________________________________________________________ Before a larger group can see the virtue of an idea, a smaller group must first understand it. "Stranger Suns" George Zebrowski The Armadillo Group ,::////;::-. James Choate Austin, Tx /:'///// ``::>/|/ ravage@ssz.com www.ssz.com .', |||| `/( e\ 512-451-7087 -====~~mm-'`-```-mm --'- --------------------------------------------------------------------
Ray Dillinger wrote: [...]
I never EVER want to have to remember a username and password for a site supported by micropayments -- again, the cognitive load is too high for the piffling amounts we're talking about.
The trouble is that in the current scheme of things commercial sites don't want or need your micropayments, it still costs more to collect than they will get out of it. What they want is a "relationship" with you leading to macropayments. Micropayments - real micropayments, values much under a penny per page, reflecting the real marginal cost of delivering existing content - are, short of the Hettingian revolution, either more trouble than they are worth or just a way of weeding out the casual loafers. [...]
Finally, sites supported by micropayments are going to have to figure out something about web spiders. If "scooter" can't spend several million dollars a month on these places, they're not going to get into the altavista database, for example.
As others have pointed out there are technical ways round this, the most obvious being that they cut a deal with the search engines, using some sort of crypto authentication at search time. If they can't work out the techniques to do that they certainly won't be able to work out safe and reliable micropayments from arbitrary numbers of casual browsers. But I suspect they won't want to be indexed by real search engines. Your Time-Warner-Bloated-Media-Corps and your Coca-pepsi-colas and even your Microsofts don't *want* to have every page indexed by the likes of Alta Vista, and they spend a lot of time and effort preventing that from happening. What they want is for their metadata to be indexed. Which is precisely why the metadata is usually not useful - it is effectively advertising - which is precisely why the search engines that get me what I want to see fastest are those most closely approximating free text retrieval of the entire content through Boolean queries where I decide what I want to look for, not some employee of the the owners of the site. (Who, of course, in a nod to USan proprieties, are perfectly entitled not to let me see their web pages if I choose to ignore their front-ends and try to parachute in somewhere in the middle, or indeed for any other reason. I'm not paying these guys & I don't intend to if I can help it, and if they choose to exclude me then they can). What big commercial websites still want is the dream of a "portal" where human-indexed top-down directories channel the browser towards the officially approved provider of each officially designated category of content, presumably the one who paid them up front. The on-line shopping mall. "Make this page your home page". The net reinvented as cable TV. Eschew any web page with a title that starts with the word "My". [...]
On Mon, Feb 26, 2001 at 10:32:05PM -0800, Tim May wrote:
One obvious solution: certificates. Google and Alta Vista get "free passes." Nothing new in this. Like reporters being comped to a conference.
Right, or similar solutions based on originating domain name or IP address, with appropriate verification. I have never paid for a conference that I have covered. (Well, once I paid $20 or so to Defcon, but that was for a good cause. See y'all at CFP -- though journalists do not get free meals, alas. -Declan
participants (11)
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Adam Back -
Alan Olsen -
Declan McCullagh -
James A. Donald -
Jim Choate -
Jim Choate -
Ken Brown -
Ray Dillinger -
Sampo Syreeni -
Sunder -
Tim May