A flexible and profitable product selection strategy is to allow consumers to match products with their tastes, which enables the firm to charge maximum price. The primary argument against micropayments is based the observation that people seem to prefer subscription and bundling as evidenced in newspapers and cable programming. However, the reasons for this preference are more technological than economic. To implement consumer choices, the required investment in billing and accounting system and network delivery hardware has become prohibitive. If cable operators had invested in these technologies and equipment, they would have been well prepared to offer more choices to their subscribers beyond a few tiers.
Profits increase as the segmentation becomes finer.
If technologies were permitting, we would see finer differentiation and market segmentation even in newspaper production and delivery. Despite this clear trend toward unbundling, microtransactions and micropayments are dismissed in the digital marketplace in favor of selling large bundles in aggregated bills without encouraging a market for information on demand, small applets or your personal columns. Large digital content providers are engaged in a two-pronged strategy for electronic commerce. On the one hand, they don't see any commercial value in the exploding information offered via millions of World Wide Web homepages. That's a bad news for those individuals who wish to cash in by selling bits of information.