Micro-payment: TrialPay Raises 40 Million Dollars
- The US-based alternative payments player TrialPay announces a 40 million dollars funds raising thanks to different investors. In addition to its historical contributors, Visa has also been investing in the company.
- TrialPay focuses on improving sales using incentives and transactional advertising for large-scale companies such as Facebook as well as several online retailers. The player might use these funds to develop other innovative dedicated solutions.
- These services are designed to enable Internet surfers to acquire virtual goods when using social games (such as Zynga or EA games) in exchange for their time (watching a promotional video for instance). The solution is now also available to offline stores and should help subscribing merchants assess users’ interest in their products, reward them and create profit.
- TrialPay was founded in 2006; it now counts 130 employees and has been selected by about 70 million active users through 10,000 websites.
- These solutions could originate a new remuneration model as the market of virtual goods is taking shape, notably thanks to the adoption of micro-payment. TrialPay proposes to monetise data in order to maximise the revenue derived from single transactions.
- Visa has purchased several major players –including CyberSource, PlaySpan and Fundamo (see March-April 2010, February and June 2011 Insights)–, but it seldom invests in other players in such a way (in April 2011, for instance, it entered Square’s capital). To this respect, we might think that the card network does believe in TrialPay’s initiatives to build up a viable and profitable model.