Micropayments

The first problem I see with Jakob Nielsen's micropayment for webpages scheme is that I, and probably many other people, are pretty unwilling to pay for something I haven't seen yet. Yeah, it's only a few cents, but if I'm doing research for a school paper, I'm sure I can go through a couple hundred webpages, if only quickly clicking there to see if it has any information I need. I suppose pages could have a summary that a reader could look at before deciding to pay, but that puts a significant extra step in the browsing experience.

Personally, I prefer the Salon model, where you watch a 30 second commercial for a pass for the whole day. I probably look at Salon once every couple of months, and if I follow a link there I'm usually happy to let the commercial play before viewing the site. Once I have a day pass, I can read as much as I want for 24 hours. No worries about whether the content I'm going to get is worth letting a commercial play in the background before viewing the site.