Micropayments: Effective Replacement For Ads?

[Ray Dillinger]

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