Here’s a situation that happens to me on a surprisingly regular basis. I’m online and someone posts a link to an article which sounds very interesting, right up my street. I click on the link and some website loads up and I see the title of the article and some leading image. I start reading and as I make my way through the first paragraph the text slowly fades out from one line to the next until it’s completely invisible. Just below this is a box “Subscribe to keep on reading”.
Yes, I’m sure you’re familiar with this too. It’s the paywall. If you want to read this you have to pay.
Of course, in principle there’s absolutely nothing wrong with this. I totally understand. Investigative journalism takes time and money, people need to earn a living, and plastering adverts everywhere is not always a viable solution (and I personally believe it to be bad in general).
However, here’s the issue. At least for me, I’m self-employed and I have to watch my expenses, especially recurring ones. Sure if it’s a website I visit regularly then I might consider it. I subscribe to The Local as it’s a great source of news for English speaking migrants in Germany. But all these other sites I fall upon every once in a while? All that happens is that I close the tab and forget about it. I’d be happy to pay a once off fee to read the article, but there’s no way I’m committing to spending $5 a month or a week or whatever, when all I want is to read this single article now.
Enter micropayments
I’m convinced that the solution to this is micropayments.
Imagine if you landed on that article and it said you can subscribe to read all articles for X per month, or pay 25c to read just this article now. Well hey, 25c sure, I don’t mind paying that, the article sounded very interesting.
The thing is, for this to work it needs to be baked in, it needs to be universal. It can’t be a piecemeal mess of different approaches from one site to the next. And what’s more – no one wants to be building a plethora of different systems to take digital payments of 25c. Transaction fees probably immediately kill that idea. It’s just not worth it. And it’ll be a huge piece of friction if I go to Site X and I have to create an account, then enter my credit card details, and finally pay the 25c to read that article, and then later on I click on a link to Site Y and I have to do the whole thing all over again.
It has to be a protocol
I’m convinced that the only way micropayments can work is if it’s built out as a full protocol. There are lots of different protocols on the web today. A simple one we all know is email. It’s still around and in use because it’s a protocol. It doesn’t matter who your provider is, it’s all interoperable. Email wouldn’t have worked if you had to have a gmail account to email people on gmail and you needed a hotmail account to email people on there (in fact that’s sort of the situation we have now with instant messengers, everyone has three or four different IM apps installed because some friends are on one platform but not another – and I think we can agree it’s a total shit show).
Anyway, I digress, lets go back to our use case.
You land on Site X, there’s a recognisable button for a micropayment transaction to access the article. You already have an account with your preferred micropayments provider and you’ve connected your account to your web browser. You click the button. A familiar modal dialogue is presented by your browser asking you to confirm payment of 25c to Site X, and saying that you have $X credit in your account. You enter your PIN or scan your fingerprint. Boom, you’re reading the article.
I think we can all agree that this would be pretty great no?
Is it a trivial task to get something like this implemented? Of course not. It’s something that would require a lot of cooperation and planning. And of course much as I hate to admit it, I’m proposing yet another situation where companies can insert themselves in between customers and businesses and leech a percentage without actually ‘making’ anything. But I think in this case it makes a lot of sense.
Of course there’s a lot more to it than the simple paragraph I’ve described above, and it’s not like micropayments haven’t been tried before, but the thing is that no one, from what I can tell, has taken the approach of developing it as an open protocol. I think that’s the key to its success. You avoid the problems with expensive credit card transaction fees by people topping up their account with one of many providers in larger amounts. Providers can be local and integrate into local payment systems, so in places where direct debit is more common, the provider will connect in with familiar direct debit systems, in other countries where people pay by SMS, the provider will offer that option. The link between payment provider and vendor is handled by the browser or the app developer and uses a universally recognised approach defined by the protocol. The only thing I’m not 100% sure on is how the vendor collects their credit from the payment provider – there would need to be some connection between payment providers that would free them from any transaction fees. I’m sure there must be a way.
It’ll simply never work if it’s not a protocol. I’ll sign up for Zibble to make micropayments for Bloomberg and The Washington Post, but then I’ll land on The Atlantic and need a Mizzle account to make micropayments to them, and then when I hit Der Tagesspiegel I find out I need a Dezbler account.
Anyway. I think you get my drift. I am throwing this out into the ether in the hopes that it inspires someone with more technical knowledge and connections than me to make something magically happen.
What do you think? Is it conceivable?
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