The absence of transaction fees apparent on most e-currencies have brought about companies such as http://www.bitwall.io who propose a financial transaction service to “unlock the Internet’s monetization potential”.
Bitwall.io compare their service to the “good days” of vending: 25 cents for a singular item (see below).
But things have moved on since the “good days” and by looking at this business using a common marketing technique: segmentation by demographic we can ask the question: How does (micro)charging for on-line content match the general demographic of today’s internet users? also what customer segment would they attract?
Barbara Kahn professor at The Wharton School, Penn. commented in a marketing lecture on coursera.org (2013) that Generation Y (Millennials) demonstrate affinity for free on-line material as a general trait.
This suggests that in general paying for on-line material and hence Bitwall’s business model may face challenges in securing in customers born between 1980-2000 which is unfortunately the proportion of the population that spends the most time on the internet (Ipsos Media, October 2011).
On the other hand the perception of paying “next to nothing” may be just as good as being free. This means that Millennials may very well pay for a product/ app/ article as they may see 25 cents as worthless pocket-change (but this raises the questions, why is pocket-change perceived as next to nothing, is this due to the fact it is in the form of coins? how does the proliferation of e-transactions affect the amount of coin change generated? would amalgamating this change in an account affect the perceived value of each cent?). Further market research can be performed to gauge this range and I think it is important to research what are the characteristics of an on-line product that customers are willing to pay for to see if Bitwall.io are offering service that people will actually use.
With this insight of internet users Bitwall.io can adjust their customer value proposition to make their service more attractive. Bitwall.io may even start a service using blue ocean strategy, it is very possible that there are dollars to be earned by products with unique characteristics that no-one else has exploited yet.
So ruling out the Millennials, what portion of internet-users remember the “good days” of paying for newspapers?
http://www.psfk.com/2009/02/us-report-internet-usage-by-age.html
According to the psfk (2009) table above 70% of the internet using population in the US grew up in an era before internet news. This is definitely a large market but it is pertinent to question whether this 70% are willing to return to paying for little things like the on-line equivalent of newspapers. If we do compare this to the “good days” 25 cents for a newspaper of approximately 200,000 words is a great deal… I’m not sure if current publishing houses are saying if they are offering the same number of words for 25 cents. I speculate that internet articles are under 2,000 words and if it is charged at 25 cents it is not a fantastic deal.
Therefore, the lack of clarity on the end product along with lack of research makes it hard to know who the market are and how the market of tomorrow will take to micro-transactions of this manner. It is up to the companies producing the material to convince the customer to part with money regularly and to find what customers are willing to pay a premium for. Another way to approach this situation is to find the price-point which customers believe to be fair value.
These latter issues have little to do with companies like Bitwall.io who are concerned with the financial transition logistics. Bitwall.io may already have research pertaining to the future of this market for transactions of this size. It is a bold move to start up a company with such uncertain prospects but the low-costs do somewhat mitigate the high-risk. What Bitwall.io are doing is common practice in the start-up community today, I’m not referring to the actual business but the nature of taking a mediocre, poorly-researched idea and building a website which fingers-crossed with generate enough interest for a 6-figure buy-out.
One final thing, we have postulated that Millennials would not be as big users of this service as other older generations. So while it is edgy for designers to use Millennial-friendly web design and currently popular Avengers themes (see below) is it really appropriate for capturing the non- Millennial target market? It is thus my opinion Bitwall.io are actually targeting the young trend-watchers of the likes of Google in anticipation of a buyout and not really committed to providing a service to a market segment they have no research or customer relations with.
Current Bitwall.io theme: Avengers
The New Exchange 
Very Interesting. The internet is so unbelievably massive and exponentially growing.. The scale of this Business would have to be enormous and everyone would have to accept buying content in order for it to work.