Adsense == Micropayments

Micropayment schemes have been around since the beginning of the graphical web browser. I remember in 1994 or 1995 listening to a presentation at NCSA (home of Mosaic, the original browser) about an early idea for micropayments. At the time, I was impressed by all the thought which had gone into ensuring cryptographic anonymity, fraud protection, and so forth, but I wasn't really clear as to why someone would want to buy a newspaper one article at a time. The ensuing years have recorded the failure of one micropayment system after another, each more elegant than the last.

This isn't an original thought, but the real micropayment system is with us now, in the form of Google's AdSense program (and, I presume, future advertising programs which will imitate it). On average, I get a fraction of a penny for every reader of my blog. Enough, I expect, to pay for the hosting and maybe a cuppa joe every few weeks. The reader pays not in cash, but in some small sliver of his or her attention--enough for an advertiser to occasionally get a message through, which is when I get paid.

That advertising is the online micropayment system shouldn't be a surprise. After all, that's how every other medium is financed. Even the magazine you pay for on the newsstand gets most of its revenue from advertisements, not copy sales. Only a very few support themselves entirely through reader/viewer payments (for example, Consumer Reports, public radio, etc.).

As for myself: I write this blog because it gives me a way to set down the thoughts which otherwise threaten to leak from my brain, and pretend that someone might actually read it. Financial reward isn't even part of the picture, but I do like not having to pay for this odd habit of mine.