Business Idea #0002: Micropayments

In a sense, this is not a new idea, since Apple has already shown that it works. The idea is, offer a small bit of work for a ridiculously low fee. Apple does it with songs. You pay something like ten cents a song to download it. Ridiculously cheap, absolutely brilliant. Imagine a million people downloading your song at ten cents a pop. You make $100,000 less the site hosting and promotion fee, which is typically around 15%. So you wind up with $85,000.

Would you sneeze at that money?

So why not extend the model to others? Let's say you're a poet. Offer your poetry at 5 cents per download. At that price, it's easy to get a million, maybe more, people downloading it. Why would they forward it to others when they can just tell them to register and download whatever they want at 5 cents a pop? So you'd make approximately $42,500 for every poem you write. I say approximately because some poems will be downloaded less than others.

Perhaps Apple will iPod your poems.

Become a millionaire, 5 cents at a time.

Deepak