With such a system, non-profits like Wikipedia would not have to rely on yearly donation drives as their main source of funds, and users could donate more effectively. For every Damien Hirst, there are a number of masterful artists whose work may never find such mainstream success. With a low-cost, reliable 소액결제 미납 system, consumers could support their favorite artists and works of art or easily pay for usage rights.
24 Other systems rely on consumers setting up accounts with brokers who aggregate micropayments to place on a monthly credit statement. 25But again the barriers to entry are high and the vendor base is limited. One of the most remarkable aspects of the World Wide Web is the extent to which valuable information – information that is sold for profit outside the cyber world – is available for free.
Thomas, an early Bitcoin contributor, says much of his career has been defined by the quest for workable micropayment technology. It was part of his motivation for serving as chief technology officer of Ripple before forming Coil. Ad hoc networks are confronted with security challenges due to the characteristics such as dynamic topology, limited processing power, lack of fixed infrastructure and so on.
Pessimists note that individual consumers “dislike paying for information and positively hate meters,” citing pay-per-view television’s middling performance and the overwhelming preference for monthly access fees to the Internet as evidence. 12 One study conducted by AT&T found that customers preferred a flat monthly rate for local calls over a pay-per-call system even though many made few local calls at all. 13 If the same phenomenon holds for the Web, micropayments will lose out to memberships and advertising. Another flaw with micropayments is that frequent customers are penalized for their patronage when they pay to play. This can be eliminated by offering a variety of payment schemes, but doing so would lessen any unique effect micropayments might have on the structure and content of the Internet. So we will tie up with one of these platforms and help them as much as possible to create this ecosystem.
However, Indranil Roy, CEO, of Outlook Group, said it’s too early to reach that conclusion. It will take years for it to mature into a well-paid subscription model. But I am personally very optimistic because I believe people will pay for good content,” he said.
A report by Forrester notes that MP3.com had 90,000 unique visitors a day downloading 50,000 tracks from 75 bands. 33 And it predicts that the downloadable music market will capture five percent of music retail revenue in the next five years. 34 If music companies can successfully introduce trusted systems in songs, reducing the price of music to under a dollar per song could open up a massive new market with significant marginal returns.
“There have been a number of attempts to implement micropayments,” writes Shirky, “and they have not caught on in even in a modest fashion.”It’s true that a small army of companies has tried to enter space and failed. The list is long and includes companies like Beenz, CyberCash, Cybercent, Cybercoin, Digicash, eCharge, FirstVirtual, Flooz, and MicroMint. And in the case of CyberCash, it’s mainly to announce the company’s acquisition by VeriSign. Other players that have been around for a while, but have little visible market traction in the U.S., include CyberChange, eCash, Internet Dollar, Millicent, Pay2See, and Trivet. Of course, anyone who has spent a minimum amount of time surfing the Web knows that advertising is the dominant revenue model for commercial sites.
On the one hand browsers receive tangible rewards for their surfing in ways the regular economy can only simulate. On the other hand basic conveniences like ignoring ads or accessing interesting content are commoditized in ways consumers generally don’t contemplate. Although Cable and PBS each charge consumers for the privilege of ignoring ads it is done so on an indirect and monthly basis that consumers seem to find less offensive. A tab transaction is written to increment small payments from the tab between Alice and Bob. These transactions are written to be valid on the bitcoin network but they are only shared and validated by Alice and Bob (until it’s time to settle up and close the tab).
The general argument is that this would allow a transition away from ad-supported content on the internet, which is still the thesis behind the Brave browser and its tokenized browsing model. Micropayments are especially well suited for buying digital products that can be downloaded directly from the Web, including data, music, services, and software. 11 Since the marginal cost of producing and distributing these products over the Web is negligible, companies can afford to sell them at very low cost, assuming there is sufficient volume to justify the initial expense. Optimists suggest that once micropayment technology is perfected, consumers will willingly pay five cents for a newspaper article, a dollar for a song, two-fifty per stock trade, or ten bucks to rent Microsoft Word until the term paper is done. The Internet changes the logic of bundling for digital products, however, since the marginal cost of production is reduced to almost zero and distribution costs are negligible.
Last month, Outlook magazine received a phenomenal response for its edition that declared the government ‘missing’, in its cover story. The edition, which raised a raging issue and criticised the government for its mishandling of the second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic, had articles by eminent personalities such as Shashi Tharoor, Pratap Bhanu Mehta and Mahua Moitra among others. Artists would also be able to engage with patrons directly, rather than losing a percentage of revenue to a third-party site, further securing their financial futures. We think this technology, when implemented through open protocols and standards, is both a necessary change to enable the next generation of digital media, and an opportunity to fix some of the problems with today’s web.