The conundrum of cracking micropayment adoption has been around as long as the internet itself and no company has yet found the ‘it works’ solution. Especially in these tricky times where advertising rates are plummeting, publishers are very much in search of viable alternatives. One of these could be a yet to be released service called Znak It. Its main benefits :
1) it doesn’t require the user to login for every transaction - you are constantly logged in whenever surfing and can confirm a transaction in a second with just two clicks.
2) it makes it easy for publishers to implement the system for any type of content
3) it’s designed with real micropayments in mind, meaning you can charge even 1 cent for your content
But to better understand why it stands a good chance of success, let’s take a quick look back at the history and evolution of micropayment processing.
Charging for content has been the dream of publishers and most any author who spends serious amounts of time contributing well written and researched articles to the web. In the early web days, token (virtual currency) based systems were all the rage. Róbert Párhonyi, Lambert J.M. Nieuwenhuis & Pras have a good listing of these in their 2005 paper “Second generation micropayment systems: lessons learned”
- Millicent (1995),
- MicroMint and PayWord (1995),
- Mondex (1995),
- SubScrip (1996),
- ECash (1996),
- NetCash (1996),
- CyberCoin (1996),
- iKP (1997),
- Mini-Pay (1997).
- Beenz (1999)
- Flooz (1999)
This first generation of systems did not gain adoption due to complexity, lack of interoperability and poor web interfaces. No single player was able to build the scale required for mass adoption. It soon became clear that traditional payment providers were better positioned than startups to push through adoption for their systems and so today we have Click&Buy, PayPal (because everyone has a PayPal account!) & Amazon Flexible Payment Service (allows login with amazon credentials) as the main providers for professional publishers. On the lower end of the scale there are two ‘tipping’ services worth mentioning; TipJoy (has twitter integration) and most recently Kachingle which both rely on users to feel compelled to ‘tip’ the publisher when they deem a post interesting enough.
But none of these services seemed to fit what we were looking for, the professional solutions being too expensive and cumbersome and the lower end ones being too flimsy. So while thinking about the ideal solution, we found an interesting blog post by Rex Sorgatz on his blog Fimoculous in which he describes his ideal next generation subscription based system that would make it super easy for publishers to lock premium content and for users to unlock that content for pennies with just a couple clicks. At the end of the day, no matter all the skepticism about paying for content, it seems logical people are willing to pay for interesting content if it was inexpensive, quick and simple enough to feel completely hassle free to the user to do so.
Which is when we found out about Znak It, which seems to have exactly this type of model planned. We can’t say too about how well the model will work but we’ve gotten in touch with the Znak It team and they informed us they’re launching the product in early April and we’re scheduled to be amongst the first adopters, so we’ll be posting a complete review of the service here around mid-April.
