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"The idea of micropayments has been around for quite a while. They've not yet taken off and many people think they never will. Our experiences suggest the opposite. We believe that if donating were safe, easy, and immediate, with a low overhead incurred for small donations, it would in fact become a viable funding source for many.
Our experience suggests that people are willing to donate, and donate non-trivial sums, if the motivation to do so can overcome the effort involved and the perceived security risk.
In fact, we believe that the paradigm shift required for successful adoption may not be the move to "micro" donations at all, but the move to super-easy-donations.
If users could simply hit a button on their keyboard to donate a dollar or two to a website, and be confident that their donation would be securely processed with no risk to themselves, and knew that their donation was going to the content creator and not some middleman, we think it would become a viable funding mechanism for all kinds of content creators including musicians, writers, and software authors. The key is making it easy, and giving donors feedback that their donations have a real and concrete effect on the content creation.
While there are a few small micropayment services in existence now, they don't have enough market share to make them attractive to users or content creators. Until users are motivated to donate into these services to create a buffer account of money they can donate, and until content providers support such payments widely, it's a lost cause. However it seems inevitable to us that eventually as digital payment systems become universally accepted and standardized, we're likely to see a standardized micropayment system where any user can buy anything on any web page, from any computer terminal, with a simple click or thumbprint swipe. When that happens, it should make micropayments considerably easier for individuals to make a living off of, rather than depending on the filters of large corporations, news organizations, software companies, music labels, etc."
