Monday, June 27, 2005
MarketWatch columnist quotes speculation about Google and micropayments
Coming soon: Net pay-per-view?
By Bambi Francisco, MarketWatch
Last Update: 8:31 PM ET June 23, 2005
Bambi Francisco is Internet editor for MarketWatch in San Francisco.
SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- The killer application for new payment systems on the Web will be digital content.
That's the prediction from Kevin Lee, who often opines about the future of search and commerce. Lee is the co-founder and executive chairman of Did-It.com, a search-engine marketing company that helps marketers get the most bang for their search-advertising buck.
As Lee sees it, the true potential power that Google (GOOG: news, chart, profile) would have, if the world's biggest search engine were to offer an electronic wallet of its own, is to be the facilitator of digital media swapped back and forth on the Web.
The "real killer application potential of Google payments [is] pay-per-view content," Lee said in an e-mail.
"Searchers want great, high-quality content, and some of them will be willing to pay for it," he wrote. "I'm not just talking about the lofty $5 per article that a stock analyst report or medical document might fetch, but also the 8 cents searchers would pay for access to their favorite song lyrics, or 1 cent to read today's blog post by Al Franken or Rush Limbaugh," said Lee.
Google CEO Eric Schmidt, through a Google spokesman, confirmed that the company is working on an electronic payment service, but gave no further details.
