Micropayments: Effective Replacement For Ads?

[Sunder]

"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.


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