For Pennies A Day

I've done my small part to help the search for intelligent life in the universe. Last week I went to seti.org, home page of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, clicked on its new Click to Give donation box and charged $1 to my American Express card. SETI wasn't actually my charity of choice--though I'm as curious as the next guy to find out who's living out there. I was led to the site by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, who was walking me through the newly launched Amazon Honor System.

Bezos' latest project is designed to make it easy for Amazon's 29 million registered users to make small contributions to their favorite websites. He thinks his cyberspace tip jar could help save worthy but struggling dotcoms and at the same time sop up a little of Amazon's red ink. (Amazon gets 15[cents] plus 15% of each contribution.) But there's more to this than charity. Amazon's new feature is a forerunner of what could be the Next Big Thing on the Net--micropayments.

Micropayments--also known as "pay-per-clicks"--enable sites to impose tiny charges for little bits of online content. The reason they are needed is that macropayments haven't been working very well. Except for the Wall Street Journal and some pornography services, content sites have been having a hard time selling subscriptions. The new thinking is that people might be willing to pay for content provided 1) they can pay a la carte for only the specific articles, music and streaming videos they want; and 2) they don't have to pay very much.

Micropayments are just starting to take hold. On the New York Times website, today's paper is free, but last month's story about the presidential Inauguration costs $2.50, charged to your credit card. At Sony's music website, $1.99 lets you download singles like Rage Against the Machine's Ashes in the Fall. Internet forecasters expect more and more sites to impose smaller and smaller fees--in some cases mere fractions of a penny.

It's an idea that makes a lot of sense. Popular websites draw so many millions of visitors that even tiny fees can add up quickly. I probably wouldn't have paid $60 a year to use icebox.com, the smart, edgy online cartoon site that went belly-up last week. But I would have been happy to pay 20[cents] every time I watched a new episode of Zombie College.

The biggest problem with micropayments is managing the payments. Credit cards, which require each transaction to be separately billed and processed, aren't designed to handle charges of, say, 7[cents]. But new players are moving in. Compaq's MilliCent, for example, is a pay-per-click network currency that will let Web surfers micropay for everything from news stories to online games. Users will be billed by credit card, phone, ISP bill or prepaid card.

Why should we care about better ways to be charged for Internet use? We've got used to the idea that everything in cyberspace is free. But it takes money to produce quality. If micropayments mean we will have access to the kind of online content we really want--and if big spenders like me can help SETI find those little green men--they'll be truly a small price to pay.

For more information about the Amazon Honor System, including a list of affiliated sites, go to Amazon.com/honor