So you see an intriguing headline for an article on your favorite sports team on, let's say ESPN.com for instance, but it's on their premium content section that's for subscribers only. But you don't want to have to pay $14.99 a year to subscribe to ESPN.com just to be able to read only one article!
That's where micropayments come in handy for both visitors and content providers. Micropayments would allow that visitor the ability to access that premium content article for only a couple pennies without having to commit to a subscription they don't want, or allow them to customize their content around their favorite sports team for a lot less money than the regular subscription rate, and it allows content providers the ability to still be able to make money from their premium content by providing it to their visitors on an ala carte' basis. Everybody's happy!
What that means is, as websites become more complex, the felixibility of offering a more customizable visitor experience increase dramatically. This will allow visitors to control their visitor experience as opposed to the content provider dictating the experience.
And these days, it's getting more and more expensive to create and maintain a website, and like the days of the backyard mechanic, where anyone could fix their own car with a couple wrenches and a screwdriver, to where now you can't even change the air filter without having to hook your car up to a diagnostics machine, websites are becoming the same way. The days of just slapping together a website with Dreamweaver or writing your HTML on wordpad, the uploading it to the web are dying too. Visitors are demanding more sophisticated content and more sophisticated and interactive delivery methods like Flash, CSS, interactive video, etc., all of which cost money to create and maintain. So, it will be just as important for websites to have the ability to monetize their content as it will be for the visitor to be able to customize their visitor experience. It's a symbiotic relationship that will only grow more iinterdependent as time goes on.
Content providors are going to have to change to keep up, or be left behind.
