Ok, I’m just going to give up on trying to think of Internet business ideas. As regular readers will know, I’ve been thinking a bit about micropayments lately. I had two ideas regarding micropayment systems for giving tips for blogs etc:

(i) Make it as simple as possible to give a tip (one click tipping); and

(ii) Allow tippers to give tips on credit, and collect the bills later.

I thought (i) was important to reduce transaction costs, and (ii) would help to overcome network effects problems. Other micropayment systems that I’ve seen require you to deposit some money first to set up an account. The problem is, if there are very few blogs or artists in the network, it’s very risky to deposit any money in the account, since you may never be able to use it to give tips to the people you want to. Anticipating a lack of tippers, bloggers and artists wouldn’t want to join the system either (the classic two-sided chicken-and-egg problem). My solution was to allow tips on credit. Then people will be less cautious about joining the system. And there’s very little incentive to cheat and not pay up later — why give a tip in the first place if you’re going to cheat? You’re just wasting your time and not getting anything nor hurting anyone else.

So it turns out that tipjoy pretty much implements these two ideas. It’s very simple, and you can tip on credit. I couldn’t have done it better myself. The only restriction is that you have to give your earnings to charity, or use them to buy stuff from Amazon. That’s fine, I like books.

Tipjoy is very new, just launched last month, and has already collected about $1,400 in tips. No where near a massive number, but it’s a start. I’m going to add it to my site once my micropayments experiment is over.