Comments on: Micropayment idea.

Micropayment idea.

owillis — Mon, 12 Nov 2001 20:26:57 -0800

Idea for a web content payment system (more inside)

By: owillis

owillis — Mon, 12 Nov 2001 20:27:15 -0800

Bit of a rip of these guys, but I know that there's a bunch of smart people here who could get this off of the ground.

Lets say there's a "central non-profit authority" responsible for adminstering this program. You pay in a certain amount regularly each month ($10 for arguments sake). This is where it gets technically dicey. Sites that want to participate add a line of code, somethng like

$ -- PayOMatic ID304540 -- $

Somehow your browser recognizes this and reports it to the "central authority". At the end of the month you get a list of the sites you visited and authorize wheter they can receive payment or not. Your $10 is then split up between them.

An alternative may be to have a browser front end like Safeweb. Obviously there should be privacy shields at all the ends of this.

Idea is to change the donation/transaction process so that it's not one-time micro transactions that promote things like "pledge breaks" so that instead its a one-time a month, relatively seamless deal.

Curious what you all think. Thanks.

By: canoeguide

canoeguide — Mon, 12 Nov 2001 20:54:37 -0800

What's in it for me? (as a surfer) Serious question.

By: moz

moz — Mon, 12 Nov 2001 20:56:55 -0800

i would definitely not use such a system (no offense intended). i would not feel comfortable taking money for the things that i personally publish on my website.

By: owillis

owillis — Mon, 12 Nov 2001 21:24:12 -0800

What's in it for me?
Easy way to pay for websites without a gazillion banners, popups multiple subscriptions, etc..

moz: well the whole idea would be to opt in/out, come and go as you please.

By: kindall

kindall — Mon, 12 Nov 2001 21:58:35 -0800

you wouldn't do it with a front-end or a special browser plug-in. you'd have the member sites request a small image from your central tracking server, and if you had a cookie saying you were a paying member it would tally up another visit for the referring site.

By: owillis

owillis — Tue, 13 Nov 2001 00:29:48 -0800

I'm thinking also some swiss-bank style system where the end user is shielded from the payee-site so the money cant ever be traced. And a percentage scooped off of transactions to pay for the upkeep of the exchange.

By: gleemax

gleemax — Tue, 13 Nov 2001 00:51:16 -0800

I enjoy this idea. Someone email Jakob, quick!

By: sawks

sawks — Tue, 13 Nov 2001 02:17:29 -0800

it wouldn't take long for someone to start generating fake hits so they got a bigger share of the communal $$$ - an alternative might be a user funded server that provides free hosting to worthwhile sites?

i've always found that the sites i care about dont have banners/popups etc, and thats how i (and they) prefer it - in the event that one of them was having trouble with bandwidth costs, i'm happy to make a donation, or buy a t shirt, or whatever

my problem with schemes to pay for access to websites is that they encourage people to create websites for the purpose of getting paid - while this model works well for the porn industry, i dont like the idea of it spreading to community and personal sites...

By: owillis

owillis — Tue, 13 Nov 2001 07:28:52 -0800

it wouldn't take long for someone to start generating fake hits so they got a bigger share of the communal $$$
This is why you would get a monthly list of the sites who are charged....

By: mattpfeff

mattpfeff — Tue, 13 Nov 2001 08:56:59 -0800

One trouble is it would have to be set up so it doesn't disempower the user. A user might visit some sites that are in this program but that he doesn't want any part of his $10 to go to, for whatever reason. And people generally don't want to contribute money to things before they know what it is -- e.g., if I were in this program and learned of another site that participated, I would want to visit it first, before I agreed to send some of the money their way.

So I'd suggest two refinements, either of which might help.

1. Have pay and non-pay areas on these sites. The home page and some others (about, etc.) could remain free -- visiting them doesn't imply contributing -- but other pages and files would prompt an apportioning of the $10 to the host site (and of course those pages and files would be labelled as such). This actually has the added benefit of subtlely advertising this program and associating it with valuable content.

2. At the end of the month, users could choose how to apportion the $10 among the sites they'd visited that month. This also has the advantage of giving them the opportunity to reward content they found especially valuable, and sites would gain an evaluation of each month's content (i.e., there should be some correlation between how much money a site gets in a given month and how much people valued the content).

I think an idea like this could work, especially if there were a fair number of quality independent sites involved, and they all helped encourage their user bases to join up....

By: owillis

owillis — Tue, 13 Nov 2001 09:28:13 -0800

Hmm. Good points. But how about this, as a way to circumvent not having pay/no pay areas:

When you visit a participating site, you get a popup/graphic whatever saying:

"This site is a member of PayOMatic, and will be counted as a part of your monthly subscription. Is this okay?"

Options would be: Yes/No/Always/Just This Time

Then the next time you came back it would look at your prefs and see what your payment preference is for the site.

Sites could javascript protect content they only want to show "subscribers" by registering it with the central authority then show/hiding it on their pages via something like javascript.

By: gleemax

gleemax — Tue, 13 Nov 2001 11:07:10 -0800

Sites could javascript protect content they only want to show "subscribers" by registering it with the central authority then show/hiding it on their pages via something like javascript.

View source can get around any JavaScript 'protection,' as far as I know. Plus, some people disable JS just to mess up ideas like this.

By: owillis

owillis — Tue, 13 Nov 2001 11:19:16 -0800

If the content is encoded at the central server, they wouldnt be able to view source. Plus if they were going to go to that length, they wouldnt pay any way. If people disable JS they dont get to see it. Oh well, I suppose.

By: mattpfeff

mattpfeff — Tue, 13 Nov 2001 11:31:02 -0800

When you visit a participating site, you get a popup/graphic whatever saying: ...

Makes sense to me, sure.

Another point, re: the JavaScript protection -- it's fine if you intend to leave this content open to non-PayOMatic subscribers anyway. I mean, subscribers would already have committed their $10, and would have no incentive to steal.

By: owillis

owillis — Tue, 13 Nov 2001 12:15:46 -0800

Right. But if someone felt the need to encode their content so only PayOMatic users could see it, you could have a graphic or something saying "$10 and you get access to this site and thousands of others" (a la Adultcheck) then that can hotlink to a signup.

Individual site owners could decide on individual content pieces vs. entire segments of a site that they wanted to make "subscriber only" or they could leave their site completely open anyhow but still have a payment graphic.

If anyone wants to get in on the development, please email me.

By: holloway

holloway — Tue, 13 Nov 2001 13:26:26 -0800

owillis: So you're writing it?

By: owillis

owillis — Tue, 13 Nov 2001 14:22:47 -0800

I don't really have the backend tech know-how, but would like to work on it...