Jason Kramer, Toby Kurien and Saul Kropman

An easy-to-use, simple and global micropayments system for publishers — it’s long been the missing link in the digital content game, especially for smaller publishers. Now, three SA Web entrepreneurs hope to plug the gap.

Saul Kropman, Toby Kurien and Jason Kramer, who head up start-up technology business JTS Technology Concepts, have developed a micropayments system called Cred that they say will make it easy for publishers worldwide to collect small payments from readers wanting to access their content.

If they get it right, their company could generate an enormous buzz in publishing circles. For the longest time, publishers, especially large newspaper groups, have been trying to find a model for making money online. And smaller publishers haven’t had the finances or technical wherewithal to develop their own micropayment platforms.

Cred allows publishers to “lock down” content they specify and make it available only to people who purchase access to it. The system uses credits worth US10c each. Readers purchase these credits, which can then be redeemed on websites that use Cred.

JTS, which uses the Iveri credit card payment gateway, has built a plug-in for WordPress, and Kropman, Kurien and Kramer think this open and free publishing platform, used by millions of bloggers and small publishers around the world, could be the ticket to the big time in micropayments.

JTS has developed a software backend to Cred, allowing publishers to see, among other basic analytics data, how much they’ve made from content sales.

It’s the revenue model that’s clever — it borrows ideas from Apple’s iPhone application store. Like Apple, JTS retains 30% of the sales generated by content providers, with the rest going to the publisher.

“It’s a nice, low-cost option, and there’s no cost for content providers,” Kropman says. “We take care of the risk, so content providers don’t need to worry about fraud.”

People using open content management systems like WordPress typically can’t afford the outlay involved in developing their own micropayment system. However, WordPress-based websites together attract about 200m readers a month, so it’s potentially an enormous market for the Cred system, says Kropman.

Though JTS’s primary focus has been on WordPress, Kropman says the company will develop Cred for other open publishing platforms, including Drupal.

It will also develop the product for some of the proprietary and commercial systems used by large newspaper houses.

JTS is already in discussions with a large SA newspaper group that is toying with the idea of charging for some of its online content.

Kropman, who also hosts the popular Digital Edge digital marketing podcast, admits, though, that the main market for Cred is not in SA. Rather, it’s the international community of bloggers and other content producers.

In addition to article-type content, JTS hopes those wanting to charge for multimedia content — MP3s, videos and podcasts, for example — will use the system. Writers who want to self-publish electronic books are another potential target market, says Kropman.

JTS expects to launch Cred next month, once it has made sure the system is scalable for a global user base.  — Duncan McLeod, TechCentral

• See also: The Cred website
  

This profile is the third article in a new section on TechCentral focused on technology start-ups in SA. TechCentral’s purpose in launching the section is to profile what our start-up entrepreneurs are doing and to highlight some of the interesting technology ideas coming out of SA. Do you have an interesting tech start-up? Are you doing something out of the ordinary? Why not drop TechCentral’s editor a line and tell us about what you’re doing?

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