What are Micropayments?
Micropayments are a payment system, primarily proposed for use over the Internet, whereby content or service providers accept small payments from consumers in exchange for a correspondingly small product. For example, an online magazine might charge 10 cents per page view. Or, an investment site may charge $10 for every 10 visits. Micropayments were a hot topic during the first dot com boom, when startups were looking for various ways to generate revenue over the Internet. Advertising can only go so far. In an attempt to avoid the old subscription model in which the customer makes a substantial commitment for a substantial-sized service or product, micropayments were proposed. The idea was initially embraced as ideal for the high-speed, short attention span world of the Internet, but it has yet to be widely implemented. Nevertheless, the idea of micropayments is not necessarily dead. It is implemented by several companies over the Internet. Also, with the introduction of RFID chips on
PayPal’s micropayments price is 5% + $.05 and is designed for merchants who process low-value transactions (typically under $10 in value). The micropayments rate is available to all merchants and in all countries where Business accounts are available. If you sign up for micropayments, you will be charged the micropayments rate on all transactions regardless of payment size. For more information on micropayments and to sign up, visit micropayments.paypal-labs.com.
Micropayments are payments of small sums of money, generally in denominations smaller than those in which physical currency is available. It is envisioned that sums of as little as 1/1000th of a cent may someday be used to pay for content access or for small quantities of network resources. Conventional electronic payment systems require too much computation to handle such sums with acceptable efficiency. Micropayment systems enable payments of this size to be achieved in a computationally lightweight manner, generally by sacrificing some degree of security. One example of a micropayment system, proposed by Rivest and Shamir, is known as MicroMint. In MicroMint, a coin consists of a hash collision computed under certain carefully tuned constraints. By investing in extensive computational resources, a mint may compute a number of these coins, and then sell them in batches. MicroMint exploits the efficiency of hash function calculations: any party can quickly verify the legitimacy of coi
They’re a means of offering something of value for one or two dollars. It seems counter-intuitive to spend time on micropayments as a brand because the amount paid is so small. But here’s a hook: with micropayments usually comes an audience comfortable with saving its credit card information for one-click quick transactions. You’re essentially making a dollar into a click, which becomes easier for users every time they do it. After all, it’s just a dollar. Why not? A lot of the micropayment action is happening right now in virtual gifts and virtual items for avatars in multiplayer games. Along the way, they’re already generating tens of millions of dollars in revenue. Micropayments are a big way Facebook – and Facebook application creators – are paying the bills right now. But Facebook isn’t the only platform taking micropayments all the way to the bank. Even though Facebook has gotten the most press for taking this notion to the social media set, you can’t overlook the way that iTunes
