by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
I lived through the rise of the Internet and one thing I was obsessed with was micropayments. So, when I listened to the latest Pivot podcast and Scott Galloway ranted about how everything would be better now on the Internet if we had used micropayments instead of advertising, I started.
Now, I’m too lazy to give you specific names, but here, in general, what happened.
In short, the reason why we didn’t use micropayments as the basis for supporting the digital economy is Visa bought up all the micropayment companies then smothered them. So, there you go. With that done, the digital economy, out of desperation, turned to advertising instead with all the problems that entails.
I love the idea of micropayments, but Visa saw their widespread use as a direct threat to their bottomline, so they killed the technology to protect themselves. It’s all under the digital bridge now.