Amazon Debuts Honor System For Payments
from the you-have-to-do-what-now? dept
As Amazon tries to expand into other areas to make money, they're coming up with some wacky ideas. The latest is that they're offering an honor system to pay for content on any website. The concept is based on what they did for Stephen King's novel where people could pay for some content if they chose to. The system will tie into Amazon's database, so any previous customer of Amazon could use their "one-click" feature to pay for content on another site. There are, of course, plenty of problems with this. In some sense, I guess it's competing with PayPal, which charges much less in terms of fees. Also, it's completely voluntary, and then refundable. So, someone could pay for content, and then ask for a refund. It will be interesting to see if it catches on, however. Anyone feel like paying for Techdirt? Update: It appears that Amazon made the rounds of lots of humor sites to get them to sign up for this service (which I still don't see why it's better than PayPal). My favorite take on this, though, is that of Modern Humorist, who has decided to use whatever money they get from the Honor System to buy Jeff Bezos a barbecue grill.
Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.
While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.
–The Techdirt Team
