Micropayments on the way

In the “Wouldn’t it Be Great” category: Vin Crosbie, in a posting to online-news, says he’s been hearing rumours that next month MasterCard and Visa will start handling small (micro?) transactions online.

I’ve been saying (offline) for a long time that what the web really needs is a micropayment system backed by a huge (and trustworthy) financial company. This could be just the break the micropayment movement needs. I’m still slightly worried by the implementation details; for micropayments to work there needs to be a single-sign-in mechanism of some kind and anything like that is likely to have all kinds of security and privacy concerns. Then again, the Amazon tip-jar / honor box model has been working pretty well since its introduction. It’ll be interesting to see where this goes.

Posted 24th October 2002 at 9:50 pm

This is Micropayments on the way by Simon Willison, posted on 24th October 2002.

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what is a micropayment?
allison - 26th October 2002 00:37 - #
It's when you pay a very small amount (generally 1 or 2 p / cents) to view a web site or use some kind of service on the web. With internet advertising not really viable for covering the costs of running a site these days a lot of people are hoping micropayments will provide a viable business model for small web sites.
Simon Willison - 26th October 2002 22:05 - #

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Micropayments on the way

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