Tuesday September 07, 2004

Think online payments and you think PayPal. But what about micropayments? Is that like "push"/content is king/commerce is king? What ever happened to DigiCash? Beenz? Flooz? Magic-money-button-dot-com-dot-yawn? ....yea, who cares? Well, in an era when anybody and everybody can publish words, music, pictures, movies, three-D models and just about everything else for which the production barrier to entry has fallen, perhaps everyone should care.

C/Net's TechRepublic cracked it open a little today in Digital content spurs micropayments resurgence. Interesting to ponder. Instead of recurrent payment subscription fees, perhaps a little non-commitmental micropayment is a better fit in some cases. It seems like there are "big media lite" blogs (Gizmodo,Gawker, etc) and blog authors' who "hit the big time" by affiliating with a traditional media outlet. But I'm imagining that any highly ranked attention hound could some someday soon be able to draw a nickle-n-dime pay-to-play audience in the same way that iTunes has popularized selling small units of music in small denominations. The article quotes BitPass' CEO Michael O'Donnell

That first wave of payment technologies, the currency companies especially, were too early in the development of e-commerce to succeed, and the content companies weren't ready to handle it either.

Are we heading towards a creative utopia where we can all live an iLife, post to our blog, pursue our creative endeavors, stoke our iEgo up and maybe even be paid for it? Probably not. But it might not be so far fetched either.