Amazon aws and related services can charge you a rate per email, or per unit time of computation, so why can't news sites just charge you $0.01 to read an article, or even half that?
Ask HN: Why aren't micropayments a thing?
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Re: Ask HN: Why aren't micropayments a thing?
#2Fees? Sure, a service might charge you a small rate per email, but are they going to charge you for just one email at a time? Probably not. But that could easily be a problem for a news site.
Re: Ask HN: Why aren't micropayments a thing?
#3Fees? Sure, a service might charge you a small rate per email, but are they going to charge you for just one email at a time? Probably not. But that could easily be a problem for a news site.
I guess there would need to be a 3rd party or even in house token system where you buy something like 1000 token for a dollar. And you can spend x tokens to view an article. Online advertising like Google ads is essentially doing this for ad views/clicks
Re: Ask HN: Why aren't micropayments a thing?
#4Processing a credit card costs $0.02 per card, plus interchange of up to 3%. Debit processing is $0.22 cents plus 0.05%. Both of these are the baseline cost, your merchant processor often won't be able to even get these rates for their own wholesale rates.
Now try and build a micropayments ecosystem ontop of this infrastructure that is very expensive to interact with (in the context of $0.01 charges). Amazon can do it for AWS as they aggregate many small charges into one bill, resulting in the service cost not being dwarfed by the payment processing cost.
Re: Ask HN: Why aren't micropayments a thing?
#5Because payments are a hassle.
People resent that the credit card companies take 3%, but it takes more than just 'transfer money from this account to that' but also dealing with fraudulent buyers and sellers.
In the case of you visiting a site and feeling you didn't get 0.005 cents worth of value it is very clear that somebody could perceive it was unfair. In the advertising economy, however, no one party sees the whole transaction so rip-offs can be pervasive and people don't know.
Re: Ask HN: Why aren't micropayments a thing?
#6Fees? Sure, a service might charge you a small rate per email, but are they going to charge you for just one email at a time? Probably not. But that could easily be a problem for a news site.
I guess there would need to be a 3rd party or even in house token system where you buy something like 1000 token for a dollar. And you can spend x tokens to view an article. Online advertising like Google ads is essentially doing this for ad views/clicks
PayPal could easily offer this sort of thing, along with the integrations for news sites etc.
Re: Ask HN: Why aren't micropayments a thing?
#7Transaction fees
Re: Ask HN: Why aren't micropayments a thing?
#8Accounting, transaction reversibility, and taxation.
In real life if you want to give somebody a dime, you just do it. But online you have to query your account to make sure you have enough money to make the payment, reserve the funds so the payment can go through without stopping other pending transactions, pass it the amount through some infrastructure where you can dispute the charge at a later date (if needed), and you also have to make sure the government is able to track your transactions for tax and anti-money laundering purposes.
For Amazon it's a different situation because they're charging you for a service based on usage. They have given you an account number and they handle all the accounting on their end. It's not a general payments system.
Re: Ask HN: Why aren't micropayments a thing?
#9I get stock quotes with 15 minute delay. If I want real time, I am charged 2 cents. At the end of the month all the 2 cent charges are summed and added to my monthly fee.
News sites could easily do something similar
Re: Ask HN: Why aren't micropayments a thing?
#10People don't like to do transactions. It taxes our brains and makes us make decisions constantly. We like all you can eat and watch as much as you like. Paying for things sucks even if you just pay small amounts.