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Wow it has been one crazy weekend here in Australia. A few hours drive to the north of us the country is flooded and people have lost their lives, homes and possessions to some of the worst floods we've had in years. Away down south we've had terrible bushfires that arrived so quickly that people had no chance of escape and over 100 have lost their lives and over 600 homes have been destroyed.

All that just reminds us that there really is no permanency about life, it's fragile and things can change in the blink of an eye. Remember that in the way you treat those around you and those that you do business with.

How Confusing
Earlier this morning I was reading a report in one of our leading daily papers that the online advertising market is set to break the $2 billion barrier by the end of this year and Internet advertising will soon be second only to television for advertising. At the same time Steve sent me a link to a report that About.com is laying off around 10 per cent of their staff because advertising revenues are down.

According to About.com the cost of displaying banner advertising is coming down and it's hard for big online sites to attract the advertising revenue that they once had. Now if that sounds just a tad confusing then you're not alone because it doesn't seem to make much sense to me either.

I actually think that the reporter had the difference between online sales and online advertising completely confused.

Micro Payments
Micro payments have long been an interesting possibility in both mainstream and adult but they have never really taken off in adult even though some billing companies have offered webmasters a micro payment option. In mainstream they have seen some limited success ... particularly in the sale of music.

If you're not sure what a micro payment is then let me explain how it is supposed to work. These days here in adult porn site members can pay as little as a dollar for several days access to a paysite and while that doesn't sound much it's not quite what we mean by a micro payment.

A micro payment is a one-off payment for a very limited access to some form of premium content. There's no re-billing involved and the amount charged could be less than a dollar. The access that someone obtains when they make a micro payment can be as limited as a one-off download or maybe a couple of hour's access to a site.

Theoretically it's a great way to sell access to content. For example I could write a whole bunch of erotic stories and wrap them up in an e-book and then use a micro payment system to allow a purchaser to download that e-book. In practice though it's not a system that has really worked either here or over in mainstream for whatever reason.

Perhaps it's been a lack of trust on the part of surfers that has been a problem and, when you think about it, paying a few cents for access to something ... even limited access ... does sound like a bit of a con especially when so many have been burnt by unscrupulous online merchants in the past. Perhaps there's also been a problem with the processors because who wants to sell something online for a few cents when the processors are going to take a big chunk of that payment?

Whatever the reason it's simply not been a success even though there have been plenty of opportunities to get it off the ground. But now things may be about to change with micro payments because Amazon has just announced that their flexible payment system is going to be opened up for general use.

Now webmasters and content creators who have something worth selling can have access to Amazon's credit card processing platform and the commission rate is very small. The rates that I have seen can be as low as a total of just six cents so it will be interesting to see where that goes.

While I strongly doubt that Amazon will ever allow porn merchants to use their system it could be that some bikini type content will be allowed ... and maybe even some stories (fingers crossed) ... so perhaps adult webmasters and content creators will have some limited access after all.

Of course we still have the problem of overcoming the surfers' resistance to micro payments but perhaps with the backing of the Amazon name that could be a thing of the past.

More Interesting Search Patents
Before I go I should mention two new and interesting search patents that have just been granted to Yahoo. There first is System and Method for Predicting Clickthrough Rates and Relevance and the second is System and Method for Determining Semantically Related Terms.

You will find them both over on the US Patent & Trademark Office site and they both make for some interesting reading ... even if all you read is the Abstract for each of them.