Suck and Feed ... Suck and Feed ... yes, it's what babies do. It's also what Automatic Media doesn't, at least not any more.

This is a damn shame. My question is this: could the current round of Web-zine & content-driven site implosions have been averted if micropayment technology had taken off? I mean, isn't it all about a revenue stream? I know I've banged on before about the webvertising implosion, but this is important.

CyberCash (aka CyberCrash), founded to do precisely that, foundered trying to do precisely that, retrenched as Glenn Melton's atavistic tendency told them to as a credit-card clearing house (mostly servicing porn sites, natch), and then went into the classic death spiral of rightsizing, downsizing and finally capsizing (OK, they were bought by VeriSign, but it was too good a line to pass up).

The same fate, or one equally dire, surely and depressingly awaits Digital (or Compaq's) Millicent or Jalda. Millicent, in fact, never seemed to even get off the ground, and Jalda's success seems tied to such other continually just-over-the-horizon technologies as 3G/iMode/Web-phones-that-work (anyone for Symbian?)

But what if sites were able to receive (a small amount of) money every time you viewed one of their pages? IMHO, if we are ever to return to the days of a robust and vibrant ecosystem of content-driven websites, then sooner or later, we (the collective we, that is) will have to come up with something more sustainable (and sustaining) than the Emperor-has-no-clickthroughs of webvertising or the sticker shock of cash-up-front for indeterminate value received of subscription sites.