Clickshare collects for online pubs
Technology trials have started for a new Internet payment system from Clickshare that will make it easier to pay for online subscriptions.
Called the Clickshare Access and Payment System, the technology lets users bill charges from several online content publishers to a single billing account. With this system, users open and fund a single Clickshare account that is debited any time they subscribe or renew subscriptions to online publications or make a purchase from one of the publications.
For users, the attraction is that they won't have to use their credit cards for small transactions, nor will they have to give their credit card numbers to multiple vendors to sign up for multiple online publications. They will have to pay only once instead, to Clickshare.
The catch is that the publisher must also have signed up for the Clickshare service. But the company hopes that publishers will be attracted to the service because it will make it easier to track customer billing, count the number of times a user views a given site, and monitor visits to advertiser-supported pages.
Two publishers are participating in the tests: Studio Briefing, a daily entertainment industry newsletter, and American Reporter, an online news daily.
Clickshare will charge $795 to each publishers and $1 to every user for the service.
The registration at Clickshare provides users with a single ID and password account and a list of publishers using the service. The system also supports authentication for intranets, officials said.
Clickshare is a privately held spin-off of Newshare Corp.
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