As the World Wide Web gained popularity, dozens of entrepreneurial groups rushed to meet the need for small on-line payments so that people could buy articles from their favorite newspaper, reports on new products, beautiful images for their computer screens. In the U.S., at least, all the banks that once supported micropayments have taken their resources elsewhere. But most Web firms weren't willing to invest in digital-cash servers and parcel up their sites into easily salable chunks without a guaranteed audience of willing buyers. In addition, at least within the U.S., widely accepted Web security standards have made credit-card payments a de facto Internet standard.
Traffic statistics suggest that half of all pages sent over the Web every day contain an ad.
Site managers settle accounts with an ad broker, rather than with thousands or millions of individual viewers. That number started above 10 percent in the earliest commercial days of the Web, sank to 2 percent by 1996 and dropped to 0.7 percent in 1998. The next step for Web sites being paid according to click-through is to share some of that revenue with Web surfers. Cybergold , for example, offers on-line payments of several dollars per click to people who sign up with the site and make purchases at the dozen or so participating merchants. Users can withdraw the balance in their account for a fee or buy a small range of digital products from the Web site.