Micropayments: Effective Replacement For Ads?

[Ken Brown]

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".

[...]