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In the early days of Web 1.0, micropayments were going to arrive any day now. Most web pages were written out of sheer enthusiasm, and micropayments looked like a viable economic model of the web. Instead of getting the content for free, you would have paid a small amount, say one cent, per page view. That would not have hit anybody’s wallet too hard, yet the most favorite web authors would have got a substantial compensation.

Apart from Paypal and similar services becoming close, micropayments are still absent. Or are they? Many pages give a nagging feeling of a non-free lunch. Of course there is sometimes the time wasted from family, work, and even self, but also the pages themselves contain elements that eat up your resources: They take screen real estate, sometimes irritate, or even try to hijack your browser. But in general, they are after your processing time, or attention.

Ads are the micropayment. For reasons that would be interesting to understand, the currency of web microcommerce has not become euros or dollars, but attention of the users. Mostly commercial content providers conspired with ad brokers, and later the vital infrastructure providers such as Google have become ad brokers themselves.

This is both good and bad. The good is that free, innovative services proliferate, the bad is that most of the action takes place under the glowing sun of attention catchers trying to provide you the latest commercial information (hmm… or should I just write “banners”?).

How analytics is related to this is obvious. Because the ads are presented in the context of other information, that other information can be analyzed to fit with the ad, so that the ad has at least some hope to be relevant to the viewer. Even better, the viewers are sometimes quite intimately “known” to the service, so that the ads can be personalized, making them even more relevant.

At its best, then, the commercial information becomes so relevant that it does not bother the user any more, but quite the contrary, the user wants to see it. The attentional price paid by the user, analogous to a micropayment, has become zero, or even negative. Getting into such a situation would require intense competition between service providers, users willing to expose their personal information, and advanced analytics. How far can we go in this direction? Or should we? I don’t know, but some of the current “Web 2.0″ sites are a good start.