Is the next emerging trend in web services going to be of the micropayment kind? If anything, Amazon’s Alexa Site Thumbnail service points to the idea of offering small value products at a very small cost.

For just $0.0002 per thumbnail, you can display website thumbnails on your site from Alexa’s database using SOAP or REST. If the site isn’t yet indexed, they’ll index it within 24 hours. This is mostly intended for sites that would benefit from having screenshots of other sites, like BuzzShout, for instance. This is unlike Browsershots, which is aimed at developers.

So, is 20 cents for 1000 thumbnails worth it? Perhaps, if you’re a large site that requires continuously updating thumbnails. But for most of us, it wouldn’t be too hard to cobble up a script to take automatic screenshots similar to what Browsershots is doing.

I say that Amazon should provide the screenshots free, just like with their Alexa graphs. I doubt that monetizing thumbnails will really be worth it for them, and, in the end, providing a service like this for free would gain the favor of web developers everywhere.

On another note, I’m sure Google has a vast thumbnail database that magnitudes bigger than Amazon’s. They just need to release the API.

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