Micropayments: An idea whose time has passed twice?

During the dot-com boom, many predicted that micropayments would soon let Web sites sell all sorts of things individually. People could buy magazines article by article, or music a bar at a time, if they wanted. In 1998, Jakob Nielsen wrote that "most sites that are not financed through traditional product sales will move to micropayments in less than two years". MIT\´s Nicholas Negro-ponte predicted the same year that "you\´re going to see, within the next year, an extraordinary movement on the Web of systems for micropayments." Well, not much happened. Payments of less than $5 generated 1 percent of online content sales in 2002, adding up to only US$9.6 million. Many small sites have either disappeared or given up on attempts to charge, and many useful Web sites still don\´t have a straightforward way to support themselves. As advertising stopped being the magic solution for Web business plans, however, some entrepreneurs took another look at small-scale payment schemes.