Aware of the limitations of advertising-supported online video, European media firms are currently testing micropayments for shows.

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At this year's Davos pow-wow, Bill Gates said Microsoft was thinking about a move into online micropayments.

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Micropayments are the foundation and most widespread form of microfinance, though micro-lending and other financial services are growing, too.

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Such digital micropayments promised to democratise commerce: anybody with an idea, a piece of news, anything at all that someone, somewhere, might want to see, could become a publisher online.

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When Facebook began back in 2004 micropayments were difficult to make because of a lack of infrastructure and because of cost, but today there is a burgeoning market for ultra low cost services.

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Led by Steve Brill, a journalist and entrepreneur who started Court TV, and Gordon Crovitz, the former Wall Street Journal publisher, Journalism Online is building an iTunes-like model for micropayments of media content.

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Typically, capturing that audience been a very hard sell to advertisers, because most advertisers are not organized that way. (Micropayments for news articles) are a way to generate revenue from an international audience.

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Some publications, such as the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal, which has more than 1m online subscribers and has just promised to develop a new system of micropayments for articles, already charge for content.

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Crovitz: One of our offerings is a new e-commerce platform that will be integrated into a Web site, to make it as easy as possible to got to one place and sign up for what they want -- an all-you-can-read bundle with a single price for multiple brands, or micropayments for individual articles.

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