The problem isn't the technology, it's the regulatory environment. If you're the payment processor who accepts Visa/Mastercard, the customer can do chargebacks.
Now you have some scummy site that scams a million people and uses your service to accept payments. By the time the scam is uncovered, the scammer has already withdrawn the money or paid it to someone else on your service. Holding the money in escrow for long enough to prevent this will piss off legitimate sellers and some jurisdictions prohibit it. The amount per user was like a dollar but in total it's millions of dollars, so you can't just eat it. But if you don't, the users issue mass chargebacks against your service and you get banned by the credit card companies.
To make it work, transactions for small amounts have to be caveat emptor, but the existing system doesn't allow that.
Then you have the opposite problem - users who make a micropayment to watch your how-to video or whatever, and then two weeks later decide "nah, not gonna pay for that" and cancel it.
Even if it were seamless, I think many people would rather just scroll past some crappy ads vs paying even a few cents to read an article. A monthly sub works better, but the content that I'm actually excited to pay for comes from folks like YouTube creators with Patreons. I don't HAVE to pay, but I like what they do enough to support them, and there are enough folks who feel similarly that they're able to sustain a decent living from it. Of course, this model only works for fairly successful creators, and greedy content companies would still run as many ads as possible even with paid subscriptions, e.g. Hulu / Comcast.
Every model, except paying individually for what you want, has big-picture problems that eventually surface.
Collective subscriptions are terrible. You don't a voice to ask for the things you like. Ads brought us private surveillance, as if we don't have enough with nosy governments.
Even if it were seamless, I think many people would rather just scroll past some crappy ads vs paying even a few cents to read an article
Every time I hear about micropayments is about people trying to sell, not people trying to buy. And most often it's people trying to sell articles and quickly giving up and using ads.
A monthly sub works better, but the content that I'm actually excited to pay for comes from folks like YouTube creators with Patreons.
All of Substack blogs I've seen have a minimum paid option of something like $4/mo and it's all literature or opinion. I want something that's useful for me and needs works and yes, it's more likely to be found on YouTube.
Then you have the opposite problem. Customers are shy about giving out their bank routing info if large transactions aren't reversible. You don't want it withdrawing against the full balance of your bank account.
It has to be something that puts a reasonable amount of the risk on the user, rather than either none or an unlimited amount.
All of those services accept credit cards. Because there would otherwise be too many people unwilling to give up their bank routing number.
What you need is something that has irreversible transactions but also has a monthly total transfer limit and a "routing number" which is unique to the merchant and can be revoked for further transactions at any time. Ideally also something that allows people to make purchases on credit and earn "points" so it's competitive with credit cards.
That way people would actually be willing to use it, instead of having to give a startup with no reputation (or a company with the foul reputation the likes of PayPal) access to their entire bank balance.
> All of those services accept credit cards. Because there would otherwise be too many people unwilling to give up their bank routing number.
That's not actually true, they allow both ACH and debit cards.
But either way it's irrelevant, revocation risk can simply be offset with a fee.
The system doesn't suddenly stop working if you can only pass on 95% of the deposited amount. Or even 90%. Or 80%. If people want it, they'll use it anyways. The thing is they don't.
There are many possible reasons why something doesn't work. You surely know some technology that few people used until a little seemingly inocuous obstacle is removed.
Or maybe they didn't start with the right customers set. I mostly hear about microtransactions related to media, press, blogs... What if the application that can ignite their use is nothing of the sort?
Now you have some scummy site that scams a million people and uses your service to accept payments. By the time the scam is uncovered, the scammer has already withdrawn the money or paid it to someone else on your service. Holding the money in escrow for long enough to prevent this will piss off legitimate sellers and some jurisdictions prohibit it. The amount per user was like a dollar but in total it's millions of dollars, so you can't just eat it. But if you don't, the users issue mass chargebacks against your service and you get banned by the credit card companies.
To make it work, transactions for small amounts have to be caveat emptor, but the existing system doesn't allow that.