Google announced Wednesday that Google Wallet will support online micropayments for news articles and other digital content.
“Users love free content, and so we expect that advertising will remain the most effective monetization model for most content on the Web,” the Google said in a blog post. “However we know that there is more great content that creators could bring to the Web if they had an effective way to sell individual articles that users can find with search.”
Publisher, Pearson and Oxford University Press, and web sites GigaOm and Motley Fool have annoucned plans to sell content using the feature. Google has not disclosed how much it will charge content providers to process these transactions.
For some merchants, swipe fees have made micropayments too costly to accept. The problem is even more severe with ecommerce transactions because merchants are unable to mandate cash. Several third party vendors have tried to make micropayments affordable for merchants, but none have had much success.
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