Germans outpace Americans by setting online micropayments standard
After some months of comparative study, the powerful German magazine
association VDZ has developed
an online micropayment standard and selected three systems to recommend to its members, so taking the global lead in this field before the Americans.
The three will probably be - yet unconfirmed - Firstgate, AOL and Deutsche Telekom.
They will handle the payments through the user's phone bills,
via prepaid accounts, or via the user's bank account once a month - individual micropayments will be aggregated over a month and then cumulatively deducted from the users account, says Alexander von Reibnitz, VDZ's new media consultant.
"We would like to work together with the big
ISPs as well as with leading, reliable and easy-to-use billing partners" he adds.
All systems are web-based and so do not require publishers to set up large new or complicated systems.
VDZ has made a selection from some 25 operational systems available in Germany.
The official recommendation will evolve in about a week's time, according to Mr Von Reibnitz.
The work is the result of a special task force under the name of Phoenix to deal with online content payment.
VDZ's choice was based upon the need for a branded service with a well known name to inspire user's trust, Mr Von Reibnitz stresses.
Studies he used show that the average payment for an
article will be about 50 eurocents, while the maximum lies at about 5 euro per session.
The organisation's move is the first of its kind in the world and is sure to have a serious impact all over the continent, Mr. Von Reibnitz acknowledges
as most publishers are still wrestling with the isssue.
A few publishers though, among them some very large as Elsevier Science, have already installed either home grown or other systems.
The recommendation will probably come in just before the CeBit, the largest
IT event in the world that takes place later this month in Hannover, where shopping publishers might otherwise be in the woods and have to wade through smaller and larger non standardized offers, some of which may have no proven track record as yet.
The publishers' need for a system, preferably standardized, is evident.
As the financial results pour in, one publisher after the other becomes acutely
aware of the urgent need to make content pay, often substantially.
This week Pearson announced plans for its FT site to go paid this spring, after having eaten up 60 million pounds that are in no way compensated by ad
sales - that have slumped anyway.
Since January the largest German newspaper, Axel Springer's Bild, started to bill for content on its Bild.de
site.
These moves are mirrored by publishers all over Europe: France, the Benelux,
where leading newspaper publisher PCM in Amsterdam has announced definite
plans to roll out billing this year. And in Norway a group of twenty publishers, including a television station, have set-up a joint effort to test
online payment for content by the name of Innholtsnett, that will run through the Norse company E-Solutions.
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