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Here's the advantage for content providers: If you wanted to sell a poem for 20 cents, you wouldn't accept Visa or MasterCard, because the fees involved would drain most, if not all, of your 20 cents. Similarly, PayPal takes 2.9 percent of a sale plus 30 cents, so selling your 20-cent poem would be a dream deferred.

But with a micropayment carrier, you could expect to give up 15 percent. Your 20-cent poem would bring in a healthy 17 cents. And micropayment providers can make life easier by paying you $17 for every 100 poems, instead of 17 cents after each sale.

The trick for micropayment companies is to convince Web surfers that there's so much good online content available for nickels and dimes that it's worthwhile to bother stocking a prepaid account with a few bucks.

. . .

"Micropayment technology in and of itself is about as interesting as new and improved dish soap," Gaynor said. "Anyone who has content worth purchasing is not going to give a chunk of their revenue to somebody like BitPass if they could build the technology themselves."

This is pretty much the same as a similar article in Business 2.0 a few months ago, but good reading nonetheless.

Link.