Earlier this week Google announced a new feature for pay service Google Wallet called “Google Wallet for web content“. The announcement was published on the Google Commerce blog and the Google Merchant Blog but was later pulled offline probably because someone decided that it was too early to publish.
But of course it was already to late because these articles tend to stay in for example Google Reader even if they are non-existing anymore. Even though now a few days later the blog post is still not published in the meantime Google did launch a website for Google Wallet for web content.
The new experimental feature is a pay wall to let publishers sell individual pages of a website, for prices ranging from 25 cents to 99 cents. After a user has paid for the article with his Google Wallet account he will have unlimited access to the content, Google even provides an archive service to help users provide perpetual access, even if the original web site ceases to exist. Publishers can offer users a preview of the content so that they can get a glimpse of what they will get after they have paid, this preview is also meant for search engines. Besides this preview of the content publishers can place ads to get an ad impression even if a user doesn’t buy the content.
For users there’s even an option for a refund. Users who paid for the content can get their money back within 30 minutes if the content was not wat they were expecting. Google says that there are checks in place to prevent excessive refunding.
Google Wallet is currently being tested with a small group of websites from the US like Pearson, the world’s largest book publisher. Business who are interested in selling content this way and are based in the US can join the experiment here. Some examples from Google Wallet for web content in action you can see here on DK.com and here on Peachpit.com.
Would you pay up to 99 cents for high-quality content? let us know in the comments!
