Why Fraxion Payments

Fraxion Payments is a technology company specialising in micropayments for online content. We’ve actually been doing micropayments on Tower Games, a multi-player wargaming website, for more than ten years.

With the “free with advertising” model getting into serious trouble in recent years, and the discussion about “free vs paid content”, online subscription models, pay walls and payment mechanisms heating up, we wondered if it was possible to use the Tower Games payment infrastructure in conjunction with a “lock” and thus create a micropayment system. And so we did.

One of the key moments in our development was when in February 2009 Walter Isaacson, former chief editor of Time magazine, wrote an article titled How to Save Your Newspaper. He described the entire history of the free content on the web since it started and the devastating effects it has had on the entire newspaper industry. Walter then outlined what he thinks may be the answer; micropayments.

He even described how this was part of the original idea that Ted Nelson had when he invented hyperlinks (that when a reader clicks on a hyperlink they would be charged a small amount of cents, or a micropayment). The idea was that those who produced good quality content would be rewarded for it.

We are totally convinced that micropayments is the way to go for online content to be viable and that this represents a vast opportunity for all those who feel they have something of value to put on the internet and be paid for it, so they can continue to do this well into the future, giving them a stable livelihood.