Monetary bovines.

At the Chicago Journalism Town Hall, a micropayment service called Kachingle was brought up as a novel way to pay for online content. (The Reader’s Michael Miner really dug it.) More recently, ForgottenChicago signed on with Contenture.

Not surprisingly, Kachingle has gone back to the drawing board with its concept. I haven’t heard of Contenture before, but I doubt it’ll have much momentum. And that’s the problem with these and every other micropayment system along their lines: inertia.

Instead of a traditional ad model, wherein a visitor views an ad and the publisher makes a little money off that view (or possibly only when a visitor clicks), the micropayment model requires several additional steps. The visitor must go to some other site, decide to create an account, and either add money to it or associate it with a money account such as PayPal. That’s three extra steps to expect visitors to complete, any of which may be a deal-breaker that disconnects the pay model. Kachingle adds yet another step — requiring visitors to not just sign up with their system but actively click a button on participating sites. Even if readers are engaged, making sure they remember to click a button somewhere on the page would be difficult without being intrusive.

Research finds that nearly 60% of shopping carts are abandoned before purchase is completed — and that’s for actual products they’re interested in buying, not websites that would otherwise be free and hassle-free. Imagine what the abandonment rate would be for a system in which people are billed for something they once got for free, and in most cases still will since micropayment is generally not used as a subscription service but rather as a voluntary payment. And when it has been used as a subscription service, it still failed.

The micropayment model has been tried several times over the past 10 or 12 years. It has never developed into something substantial and successful, even when Amazon did it. As Clay Shirky says:

The threat from micropayments isn’t that they will come to pass. The threat is that talking about them will waste our time, and now is not the time to be wasting time. The internet really is a revolution for the media ecology, and the changes it is forcing on existing models are large. What matters at newspapers and magazines isn’t publishing, it’s reporting. We should be talking about new models for employing reporters rather than resuscitating old models for employing publishers; the more time we waste fantasizing about magic solutions for the latter problem, the less time we have to figure out real solutions to the former one.

All this and more will no doubt be discussed at the Chicago Media Future Conference, which is coming up on June 13 and which I will be speaking at (though not on this topic). Come on out and join the conversation.