According to Aaron Wall’s blog, “Google is planning to roll out a system of micropayments within the next year. Micropayments, as the name implies, are small payments – a cent or even a fraction of a cent – and the idea is that micropayments can be used to pay for accessing web content.

“He has an excellent post on Micropayments/Google/Traditional Media that summarizes a few thoughts on the subject.According to his post, Jakob Neilsen predicted a pay-per-webpage-view internet access system way back in 1998.

Aaron quotes Neilsen as saying (back in 1998); “A true micropayment system would operate invisibly and simply accumulate charges on the user’s monthly bill without an explicit confirmation for every click. That’s exactly how electricity bills and long-distance telephone bills work. True, people wouldn’t make many long-distance calls if they first had to discuss the fee with an operator (though we certainly made calls back when we had to talk to a long-distance operator and acknowledge charges for each call). In any case, telephone companies now simply add up the calls and put them all on a single bill. Intellectually, you know that it costs money to use the phone and turn on a light, but if you want to talk to somebody, you pick up the phone. And if the room is too dark, you switch on the light. You don’t go out to the meter every few minutes to check on your electricity bill.”

It will be interesting to see how this all plays out.  A new system like this could really change the way the web operates.  If anyone else tried to roll this out, it wouldn’t fly, but imagine you are browsing Google, find some trusted content you want to read and have the option paying a few cents (or fraction of a cent) to get content that is “trusted” or taking your chances on free content.  Which would you choose?  I would probably choose the “trusted” content.There is much to be explored with this concept, but a change like this does have the ability to fundamentally change the way content is accessed.  Some issues I see on the horizion are:

• What do the other search engines do?  If Google is charging and others are not, what happens?
• What about people who include references to this paid content in their web writing?
• What about people who link to this content from their website?  If people started linking or stopped linking more/less to paid content wouldn’t it mess up the whole link popularity algorithm?
• Doesn’t this make Google the ultimate publisher?  If they are “publishing” the news and then charging for the news in their SERP, who really owns the content?  Doesn’t this just make the newspapers content divisions of Google?