Eyeballs as Micropayments

Here's a post that wraps up a lot of ideas.

I've often wondered why micropayments have never taken off. Personally, I'd be fine with the idea, and I can't believe I'm the only one. But they haven't, even though various technologies have been around for over a decade.

Maybe eyeballs are the solution. That is, the attention economy creates a de facto micropayment system without the need for a complicated infrastructure:

Money is a very important and useful medium of exchange for high-value, tangible products. For small-value, intangible products, the costs tend to exceed the value of the transactions—especially when you add in the overhead associated with making payments at a distance. Fortunately, human beings are clever. We’ve begun to find a variety of substitutes for money that work better in cyberspace. This isn’t the repeal of market economics, but rather an extension of them to deal with changed circumstances.

(Via Luis Villa's Blog.)