Micropayments work when the payer WANTS to pay and the payee is happy to accept such payments.

When you have a million willing payers and one payee, then you have micropayments. When you have 999,900 unwilling payers and a hundred naïfs then you have uneconomic microcharging.

For micropayments you also need goods that can be perfectly reproduced a million fold at insignificant cost to payee and payers.

All this is obvious, it just hasn’t all been put together yet.

1. We have digital goods that can be perfectly reproduced a million fold.
2. We have a billion online users of the Internet.
3. We have a billion creators of digital goods each of whom might be persuaded to accept $1,000 even from a thousand payers at a dollar a piece.
4. We have a billion people many of whom can think of a few things they’d gladly pay a dollar for.

What you can’t do is microcharge for copies of published works. Well, you can try, but you won’t get very far.

Micropayments have a future. Microcharging is the flawed impostor that discredited it.

Unfortunately, because micropayments have been discredited, people feel they need to find another term.

Thus we have Micropledges instead (hat tip Mike Linksvayer).