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A micropayment is a
financial transaction A financial transaction is an agreement, or communication, between a buyer and seller to exchange goods, services, or assets for payment. Any transaction involves a change in the status of the finances of two or more businesses or individuals. A ...
involving a very small sum of money and usually one that occurs online. A number of micropayment systems were proposed and developed in the mid-to-late 1990s, all of which were ultimately unsuccessful. A second generation of micropayment systems emerged in the 2010s. While micropayments were originally envisioned to involve very small sums of money, practical systems to allow transactions of less than 1 have seen little success. One problem that has prevented the emergence of micropayment systems is a need to keep costs for individual transactions low, which is impractical when transacting such small sums even if the transaction fee is just a few cents.


Definition

There are a number of different definitions of what constitutes a micropayment.
PayPal PayPal Holdings, Inc. is an American multinational financial technology company operating an online payments system in the majority of countries that support online money transfers, and serves as an electronic alternative to traditional paper ...
defines a micropayment as a transaction of less than £5 while
Visa Visa most commonly refers to: *Visa Inc., a US multinational financial and payment cards company ** Visa Debit card issued by the above company ** Visa Electron, a debit card ** Visa Plus, an interbank network *Travel visa, a document that allows ...
defines it as a transaction under 20 Australian dollars.


History

The term was coined by
Ted Nelson Theodor Holm Nelson (born June 17, 1937) is an American pioneer of information technology, philosopher, and sociologist. He coined the terms ''hypertext'' and ''hypermedia'' in 1963 and published them in 1965. Nelson coined the terms ''transcl ...
, long before the invention of the
World Wide Web The World Wide Web (WWW), commonly known as the Web, is an information system enabling documents and other web resources to be accessed over the Internet. Documents and downloadable media are made available to the network through web se ...
. Initially this was conceived as a way to pay the various copyright holders of a compound work. Micropayments, on the Web, were initially devised as a way of allowing the sale of online
content Content or contents may refer to: Media * Content (media), information or experience provided to audience or end-users by publishers or media producers ** Content industry, an umbrella term that encompasses companies owning and providing mas ...
and as a way to pay for very low cost network services. They were envisioned to involve small fractions of a cent, as little as US$0.0001 to a few cents. Micropayments would enable people to sell content on the Internet and would be an alternative to advertising revenue. During the late 1990s, there was a movement to create microtransaction standards, and the
World Wide Web Consortium The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web. Founded in 1994 and led by Tim Berners-Lee, the consortium is made up of member organizations that maintain full-time staff working to ...
(W3C) worked on incorporating micropayments into
HTML The HyperText Markup Language or HTML is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It can be assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and scripting languages such as JavaScri ...
even going as far as to suggest the embedding of payment-request information in HTTP error codes. The W3C has since stopped its efforts in this area, and micropayments have not become a widely used method of selling content over the Internet.


Early research and systems

In the late 1990s, established companies like IBM and
Compaq Compaq Computer Corporation (sometimes abbreviated to CQ prior to a 2007 rebranding) was an American information technology company founded in 1982 that developed, sold, and supported computers and related products and services. Compaq produced ...
had microtransaction divisions, and research on micropayments and micropayment
standard Standard may refer to: Symbols * Colours, standards and guidons, kinds of military signs * Standard (emblem), a type of a large symbol or emblem used for identification Norms, conventions or requirements * Standard (metrology), an object th ...
s was performed at
Carnegie Mellon Carnegie may refer to: People * Carnegie (surname), including a list of people with the name * Clan Carnegie, a lowland Scottish clan Institutions Named for Andrew Carnegie *Carnegie Building (Troy, New York), on the campus of Rensselaer Polyt ...
and by the
World Wide Web Consortium The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web. Founded in 1994 and led by Tim Berners-Lee, the consortium is made up of member organizations that maintain full-time staff working to ...
.


IBM Micro Payments

IBM's Micro Payments was established , and were it to have become operational would have "allowed vendors and merchants to sell content, information, and services over the Internet for amounts as low as one cent".


iPIN

An early attempt at making micropayments work, iPIN was a 1998 venture-capital-funded startup that provided services that allowed purchasers to add incremental micropayment charges to their existing bill for Internet services. Debuting in 1999, its service was never widely adopted.


Millicent

Millicent, originally a project of
Digital Equipment Corporation Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC ), using the trademark Digital, was a major American company in the computer industry from the 1960s to the 1990s. The company was co-founded by Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson in 1957. Olsen was president unt ...
, was a micropayment system that was to support transactions from as small as 1/10 of a cent up to $5.00. It grew out of The Millicent Protocol for Inexpensive Electronic Commerce, which was presented at the 1995
World Wide Web Conference The ACM Web Conference (formerly known as International World Wide Web Conference, abbreviated as WWW) is a yearly international academic conference on the topic of the future direction of the World Wide Web. The first conference of many was hel ...
in
Boston Boston (), officially the City of Boston, is the state capital and most populous city of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, as well as the cultural and financial center of the New England region of the United States. It is the 24th- mo ...
, but the project became associated with
Compaq Compaq Computer Corporation (sometimes abbreviated to CQ prior to a 2007 rebranding) was an American information technology company founded in 1982 that developed, sold, and supported computers and related products and services. Compaq produced ...
after that company purchased Digital Equipment Corporation. The payment system employed symmetric cryptography.


NetBill

The NetBill electronic commerce project at Carnegie Mellon university researched
Distributed transaction A distributed transaction is a database transaction in which two or more network hosts are involved. Usually, hosts provide transactional resources, while the transaction manager is responsible for creating and managing a global transaction that enc ...
processing systems and developed protocols and software to support payment for goods and services over the Internet. It featured pre-paid accounts from which micropayment charges could be drawn. NetBill was initially absorbed by CyberCash in 1997 and ultimately taken over by PayPal.


Online gaming

The term micropayment or microtransaction is sometimes attributed to the sale of
virtual goods Virtual goods are non-physical objects and money purchased for use in online communities or online games. Digital goods, on the other hand, may be a broader category including digital books, music, and movies. Virtual goods are intangible by defini ...
in
online game An online game is a video game that is either partially or primarily played through the Internet or any other computer network available. Online games are ubiquitous on modern gaming platforms, including PC game, PCs, Console game, consoles and ...
s, most commonly involving an
in-game currency A virtual economy (or sometimes synthetic economy) is an emergent economy existing in a virtual world, usually exchanging virtual goods in the context of an online game, particularly in massively multiplayer online games (MMOs). People enter th ...
or service bought with real world money and only available within the
online game An online game is a video game that is either partially or primarily played through the Internet or any other computer network available. Online games are ubiquitous on modern gaming platforms, including PC game, PCs, Console game, consoles and ...
.


Recent systems

Current systems either allow many micropayments but charge the user's phone bill one lump sum or use funded wallets.


Dropp

Dropp is a micropayments platform that allows consumers and merchants to make and accept payments as small as a fraction of a cent for both physical and digital goods and services Dropp is unique in that it accepts both FIAT and cryptocurrency, as well as maintains complete privacy of consumer transactions.


Flattr

Flattr is a micropayment system (more specifically, a microdonation system) which launched in August 2010. Actual bank transactions and overhead costs are involved only on funds withdrawn from the recipient's accounts.


Jamatto

Jamatto is a micropayments and microsubscriptions system that allows websites and publishers to accept payments as small as 1¢ by modifying just their HTML source code Jamatto is in use by newspapers across three continents.


M-Coin

A service provided by TIMWE, M-Coin allows users to make micropayments on the Internet. The user's phone bill is then charged by the mobile network operator.


PayPal

PayPal MicroPayments is a micropayment system that charges payments to user's
PayPal PayPal Holdings, Inc. is an American multinational financial technology company operating an online payments system in the majority of countries that support online money transfers, and serves as an electronic alternative to traditional paper ...
account and allows transactions of less than US$12 to take place. As of 2013, the service is offered in selected currencies only. The PayPal charge for a micropayment from a U.S. account is a flat five cents per transaction plus five percent of the transaction (as compared with PayPal's normal 2.9% and 30 cents for larger sums).


Swish

Swish is a payment system between bank accounts in Sweden. It is designed for small instant transactions between people, instead of using cash (cash has largely dropped in use in Sweden since 2010), but is also used by small businesses such as sports clubs that don't want to deal with the cost of a credit card reader. A cell phone number is used as a unique user identifier, and must have been registered at a Swedish bank. A smartphone app is used to send money, but any cell phone can be used as a receiver. The lowest permitted payment is 1 SEK (around 0.09 EUR) and the highest is 10,000 (around 950 EUR), although 150,000 SEK can be transferred if the transaction is preregistered in the internet bank. The fee is generally zero for private people, but when the receiver is an organisation e.g. sports club or company, there is fee of 2 SEK, which is considered significant if a sports club sells coffee and cookies at an event. Swish has become popular, with 50% of the Swedish population registered as users in 2016. Similar apps with zero fee for small instant private transactions,
Vipps Vipps is a Norwegian mobile payment application designed for smartphones developed by DNB. Vipps was released May 30, 2015 and, having reached 1 million users by November 5, 2015, Vipps became Norway's largest payment application. Although Vipps ...
and
MobilePay MobilePay is a mobile payment application developed by Danske Bank. The service allows payments by means of a smartphone application and was published on May 7, 2013, after Danske Bank discontinued its cooperation with other Danish banks on a commo ...
have become popular in Norway and Denmark.


Tikkie

Tikkie is a Dutch payment system in the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany, run by the ABN AMRO bank. It is available to anyone with a Dutch bank account and a Dutch, Belgian or German phone number. It was originally marketed as a way to share costs between friends, e.g. when sharing a ride or at a restaurant or buying movie tickets, but there is now also a business variant for e.g. paying toll fees or congestion charges, and a restaurant variant whereby the restaurant sends payment requests to the individual people at the table. Tikkie is free for private transactions (even for users of other banks, since Dutch banks typically charge annual banking fees instead of per-transaction fees), but there is a transaction cost for business clients. A Tikkie payment request consists of a generated hyperlink (which may be encoded as a
QR code A QR code (an initialism for quick response code) is a type of matrix barcode (or two-dimensional barcode) invented in 1994 by the Japanese company Denso Wave. A barcode is a machine-readable optical label that can contain information about th ...
) that redirects to the iDeal payment system which is used by most banks in the Netherlands. If the payer has a banking app for any Dutch bank on his mobile device, the Tikkie link can open the banking app directly. Alternatively, the payment can be made in a web browser. Payment requests are generated by an Apple or Android mobile app and payment requests are typically sent via messaging systems like WhatsApp or Telegram. In 2017 there were 1 million users and 150 000 payment requests per week. By 2018, Tikkie reported 2 million users and 440 000 payment requests per week. By 2019, there were about 5 million users, with 200 000 payment requests per day. 50% of Tikkie payment requests are honoured within 1 hour, and 80% are paid within 24 hours. In 2017, the average payment request was EUR 12. By 2018, the average payment request was EUR 27.50. A sender may send no more than EUR 750 and a recipient may receive no more than EUR 2500 per Tikkie. The domain name used by Tikkie is Tikkie.me instead of Tikkie.nl. In the Netherlands, it is unusual for companies to use non-NL domain names, and with Tikkie using a Montenegro domain name contributed to the success of some phishing attacks.


Blendle

Blendle is an online news platform that aggregates articles from a variety of newspapers and magazines and sells them on a pay-per-article basis, leading
Nieman Lab The Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University is the primary journalism institution at Harvard. It was founded in February 1938 as the result of a $1.4 million bequest by Agnes Wahl Nieman, the widow of Lucius W. Nieman, founder of ...
to describe it as a "micropayments-for-news pioneer". It operates in the Netherlands, Germany and the US. In 2019, five years after its launch, it announced that it would change its business model away from micropayments to premium subscriptions. Nieman Lab commented that "micropayments keep not panning out".


Obsolete systems


Zong

Zong mobile payments Zong was a mobile payment company that allowed users to make micropayments on the Internet if they have a postpaid mobile phone. The payments were charged to their mobile phone bills by the mobile operator. The company was acquired by eBay in 201 ...
was a micropayment system that charged payments to users' mobile phone bills. The company was acquired by
eBay eBay Inc. ( ) is an American multinational e-commerce company based in San Jose, California, that facilitates consumer-to-consumer and business-to-consumer sales through its website. eBay was founded by Pierre Omidyar in 1995 and became a ...
and integrated with
PayPal PayPal Holdings, Inc. is an American multinational financial technology company operating an online payments system in the majority of countries that support online money transfers, and serves as an electronic alternative to traditional paper ...
in 2011.


References


External links


W3C Micropayment Working Group
* {{cite web , url = http://wwwhome.cs.utwente.nl/~pras/publications/2005-I3E-2ndgeneration-payments.pdf , title = Second generation micropayment systems: lessons learned , first = Robert , last = Parhonyi , access-date = 28 March 2010 , archive-url = https://web.archive.org/web/20170809115618/http://wwwhome.cs.utwente.nl/~pras/publications/2005-I3E-2ndgeneration-payments.pdf , archive-date = 9 August 2017 , url-status = dead