PayPal has announced that it’s going to try and crack the long-standing problem of getting website visitors to pay for content with its new micropayments system.
At its Innovate Developer Conference in San Francisco, PayPal has launched PayPal for Digital Goods, which allows websites to charge for content, with visitors able to pay using just a couple of clicks.
Mashable has some more detail on the commercials, which PayPal is hoping will promote more websites to consider its system:
Payment transactions cost 5% plus $0.05 per purchase under $12, lower than most micropayment transaction standards.
According to PayPal themselves, this is pretty low compared with other micropayment providers. They also promise to pay the money quickly to publishers. Via a PayPal account, of course.
PayPal has enlisted the help of  a few big partner sites in order to get this up and running; FT.com, GigaOM, Justin.tv and most crucially, Facebook, where you’ll be able to spend real money on all sorts of nonsense, no doubt.
Paying for website content has been brought back into the limelight recently with the News International sites such as The Times and News Of The World hiding their content behind paywalls, and there’s likely to be many other sites considering such a move as they try new ways of monetising their content. It’s a decision not to be taken lightly, as the recent figures about the drop in visitors to The Times show. But for those sites with premium content not available elsewhere then PayPal has now made it easier to start charging for.
PayPal is likely to pick up a lot of these sites as it’s such a well known and largely trusted payment processor.
