Micropayments: Effective Replacement For Ads?

[Tim May]

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 at 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