What I _would _do is pay a flat fee to subscribe to several publications.
That's the only path: to give people more value than they expect for less money than they expect.
It could be multi-tiered: the more publications you subscribe to, the less each costs. So like there's the $19 plan, the $29 plan, and so on. Some tiers are even ad-free.
You'd also need to nurture all of these subscribers with a sense of community, public radio style.
This is more likely to emerge in the newsletter space than in the traditional new space. Innovator's dilemma.
I came across a startup awhile ago that was handling the micropayments for you and you paid a monthly subscription fee which is similar to what you want. I think the main issue is getting every publisher to agree to onboard to your platform before you have sufficient scale of paying customers.
Regular users also don't really like usage based fees which is why every consumer plan has a fixed price rather than paying per use. Cloud storage for example charging you for "up to x gb" rather than "$x per gb".
I would venture to say that what consumers don't like about micropayments is any combination of the following:
(1) It's a PITA to provide payment info most places, and comes with the leering paranoia that your data is going to be abused;
(2) It's viscerally disgusting when e.g. AAA video game developers expect you not to notice the difference between $100 for marginal extra content, and 100 micropayment charges of $1 for the same marginal extra content;
(3) It's an infohazard to the average person to inform them exactly how much they're spending on each thing in their life, because it tempts them toward a culturally validated budgetary anorexia.
Public utilities avoid (1) because it's a one-time signup with trusted vendors for years of service, they avoid (2) because utilities are priced (somewhat) rationally, and they avoid (3) because utility bills can only get so itemized.
(In reality, of course, cable providers were mostly doing this under the hood along with pocketing a big cut for themselves; television is just expensive to produce. But it didn't help the feeling of unfairness when you didn't watch any sports but ESPN was probably the most expensive channel in your "package".)
EDIT: this is indeed the Spotify model while youtuve's approach was to treat premium as a make up for missinflg ad watches so pays out from the individual viewers subscription.
That's fine for you, but I also pay for subscriptions and have 8-10 publications that I'm not interested in subscribing to, but would pay some amount to read the odd adhoc article from them.
It's a hard game to figure out, because many sites feel like they're worth $20/mo, which is true if you are reading a large amount of their content. But if I'm looking at 1-4 articles a month from them, that's a huge per-article price, even a $1/article micropayment would be a deal for me. Add on top of that the shenanigans they play with ending subscriptions at so many of the sites...
[1] https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/08/the-poster-child-for-micro...
Publishers already relying on subscription revenue need to be careful: some portion of the people already paying $20/mo could save a lot by switching to $1/article.
Newsrooms also hate that approach because of the incentive structure. A lot of the most important stories aren't the ones people want to spend $1 to read.
Apple News+ is ~$13
https://www.apple.com/apple-news/
The list of publications included
Fyi... Apple News+ subscribers don't get the full subscription to all the participating publications. This means a subset of articles and/or partial articles (teasers) that require extra payment to get past a paywall to read the rest of the story. This surprises some people.
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/why-dont-i-see-full-art...
People seem to be complaining that they can’t access Washington Post articles, but in 2024, when that thread was written, The Washington Post was not included in Apple News Plus. It joined in 2025 (https://9to5mac.com/2025/09/29/apple-news-just-added-the-was...).
What you could do before that was register your Washington Post subscription, if you had one, with the Apple News app, then you’d be able to read full Washington Post articles - perhaps this was confusing the forum posters?
They may be confusing the 2, similar to how people confuse Apple TV: separately a device, an app, and a subscription service
Apple News+ has tried this. If anyone could pull it off, it's Apple.
But the problem is, it's not comprehensive enough. The two major newspapers/magazines I read aren't on there, because they've got enough market power to require their own subscriptions. Meanwhile, this is similarly missing the long tail of a lot of links I follow that are paywalled.
And then of course there are the massive usability issues. If I see a link on HN to e.g. Forbes, and click it, I just get the paywall. Apple News+ doesn't work in the browser. I understand that sometimes it's possible to use Share... in the browser to send an article to Apple News+, but that seems to require knowing it's one of the included 300+ publications? Which nobody's going to memorize...
If I had a quick, anonymous way to pay a site 5 cents to read an article, or a dollar to read all the articles I want for some time period, or something to that effect, I'd happily pay that from time to time. What I don't want is a million subscriptions I have to pay 3 or 4 dollars a month for, when I don't read any individual site often enough for that to make sense.
And I definitely don't want them to model the system after fucking video game transactions. The fact that the author mentions the buying it in game currency as something to base this on blew my mind.
I disagree with this so much. Paying for a thing once and getting the thing is absolutely intuitive. Subscription models where you pay generally for access over a time period to a broad swath of things is counter-intuitive. I want to read a handful of articles from NYT a month. I will never sign up for a subscription for that, so I just don’t really get to read NYT articles. I’m sure there is an amount I could agree to pay for an article.
- cable bundles
- aggregate streams (Netflix, Prime, Apple TV)
- pay per view (Prime or YT TV)
And somehow all of these models now coexist.
Somehow all the media advances, the democratizing influence of the internet, the rise of social media, and the ubiquity of constant streams of news in various forms has just made the news more expensive and less trusted.
And, frankly, anyone even remotely considering microtransactions needs to take into account that one third of the population distrusts the media and another third gives it no credibility whatsoever—and money in the form of microtransactions would have to follow credibility, because nobody pays for what he believes is a lie.
[0] https://news.gallup.com/poll/651977/americans-trust-media-re...
Why not? The only argument I see here is that you have strong feelings.
People are very accustomed to paying for each thing they buy - that how we acquire almost everything. It may be "punitive" in some sense but it's fundamental to every marketplace.
iTunes thrived on that basis - paying for each song. I don't see people objecting to paying 10 cents (or whatever) to read an article.
Under the current system, we both lose out. I can't read the paywalled article and the publication doesn't get any of my money.
That isn't the case for news content. In news it's "reading this might be interesting" or being generous "knowing this might improve my life at some point".
That delay in outcome will kill micropayments because it again goes from a very easy calculation in your mind to "too hard" like Clay talked about.
As long as the sources last long enough for reputation to build naturally (so, not the Amazon LLC model), it should all come out in the wash pretty reasonably.
My suggestion was as follows:
Start the article by providing the dry facts - the meat of the article - in a super condensed format, so people get it as quickly as possible. Then, ask for money to get the rest - the analysis, the "whodunit", the "how we got there", the background, the bio's, and everything else. And then tell people: "If this interests you, you can pay $0.xx to read the rest of our article about it, including: (insert bullet points I just mentioned)"
The first section acts as proof that the person writing the article did their research; the rest is for those who are genuinely interested in the topic. It prevents disappointment and tells you clearly and transparently what you're getting for you cents.
I don't think the company did it in the end. They're struggling.
In fact, if they charged $0.20 per story if you pay directly, or $0.05 per story if you pay out of your auto-reload wallet, I think that could incentivize users to subscribe.
Of course, it would have to be shared across every newspaper, and publishers hate that. Apple News is the closest it's gotten - the app sucks, but you can share articles into it to remove the paywall and that works great.
In media generation, such as music, streaming, articles, etc the only thing that gets people to fork over money regularly is if they're a fan of some sort. The patronage system. That means they have to like you and come back to you so often that they'll feel a connection - and they'll want to support you out of the goodness of their heart. This is the strategy used by streamers, by buskers on the street, and by content creators of all sort.
The main issue with applying this to articles is that most news is discovered by way of google news, or a similar hub site, which sometimes will present news from you - but it won't happen often enough to create such a connection. One may ask if the frequency of this happening is deliberately that low, compared to social algorithms on other products, where return visits are encouraged - if you like a tweet, you get more tweets from that same person; if you like a short, you get more youtube shorts from that channel; and so on.
Ultimately for news you have to be so large that people will come to you on their own, without being funneled through google news. This works for huge news sites - the register, NYT, Golem, etc. There is no way for a small site to break through like that. I think the last time I've seen this get pulled off successfully - a website started from 0 generating a cult following - was Drudge Report.
Imagine a world where your web browser essentially contains and controls your wallet. You pre-pay into that wallet, say, $20. I imagine we'll probably also refer to that as "credits" so internationalization isn't so tough. So let's pretend we have 2000 credits. Now, let's start browsing the internet.
You start by conducting a web search. Perhaps there is a mechanism in HTML and the browser that basically say, "Clicking this will cost 1c". We'd probably develop a shorthand, some icon and beside it, it says the price in credits. Imagine a button like [(1c) Search].
Immediately, what is the benefit? The search engine works for you. It's like Kagi in that regard, but you didn't need to set up an account and give them your credit card information. YOU are the customer. There are no ads, they need to compete to make the search results the best, otherwise you're going somewhere else. You're no longer the product.
You see a news article in your search result. Fantastic. You visit the news website - there isn't an ad in sight. Pure news. The article starts with a title, a few lines, perhaps the first paragraph, and to read more, you click that [2c Read the Article] button. You click it, and boom, you see the entire article. No subscriptions, no popups, no ads. You are the customer. The news site wants you to be happy, not advertisers. You.
The news article discusses a new open source project that is really taking off. Cool! You click the link. Looks pretty neat! You download it, toy with it, and find that it's actually pretty useful! You go back to their repo site, and there's a little tip option. Easy peasy. You tip them 100 credits. No signing up for an account at some other site, no entering your credit card, just done and done.
I like the idea of micropayments because it makes the user the customer again. The internet has become incredibly hostile to users since we are, by and large, the product rather than the customer. We need to flip the incentive model. Does it suck to pay for things on the internet? A little. But I'd rather that and get a great experience (and also allow news organizations to have a working business model, etc) than what we have now.
Paying $1.00 for an in app purchase that you thought about and decided on is not a micropayment, that's just a small payment.
What makes micropayments interesting is that they can be small enough to escape notice, except in aggregate. They happen in the background, tightly coupled to the thing they're for, and not as part of an explicit purchase that added friction to the consumer's day.
I think there's probably a lot of potential to simplify things with micropayments. Like perhaps rather than paying my mobile provider to maintain a web of relationships with regional network operators and distribute money to them on cadence which has nothing to do with my usage of their network, I could instead just attach some money to each packet and transmit it to the lowest bidder in range (payment stays in escrow until packet delivered, then pays all operators involved). It could be that by cutting out the middleman I pay less and the network operators get more.
That's not what this is about though.
As you, I associate the micropayment idea with truly tiny individual payments. Like paying for bandwidth by megabyte, where each payment is much less than a cent.
The risk of fraud due to any individual payment not being fulfilled is low. At most you loose 0.01c of money, and the vendor loses $ of potential business.
Along with silly privacy/cookie flags
Then one click you can approve both, or set a policy to auto-approve any site with minimal cookies and less than 0.01%/mo of your budget.
Then ideally when you're done you click red/yellow/green buttons to close the site, indicating whether you were happy with the result. (And set your policy to avoid sites you dissed.)
Then also when you hover over a link you get a pop-up with the same rate and quality info, as text or icons.
It's easy and provable at small to large scales. It just takes coordination.
As motivation, this could enable site-side price discrimination, to maximize revenue. That could drive privacy features...
It would take 27 years to onboard every internet user to the lightning network unless you start adding level 3 aggregators and then at that point you lose all the benefit of it being on chain at all.
It would take almost 2 years just to onboard every American assuming during that time there were zero other bitcoin transactions. Then you need to add the fees for the on and off ramps to the individual transaction fees to get the real cost per transaction noting that these would go up quite a bit as the competition between lightning and non-lightning uses of the transaction space would drive prices higher.
You can't do transactions with just a database. You'd have to add a payment processor. Now things are getting wildly complex.
x402 is designed with agentic AIs in mind. AIs make mistakes. Having an immutable record that can't be tampered with is a nice layer of security.
And while I haven't worked with it personally, I understand x402 to be extremely straight forward for devs to implement.
If they don't want to be stiffed on royalties like how musicians get pennies from Spotify, news sites will need to establish some sort of co-op to host this, and not rely on the likes of Meta or Apple, as tech companies have proven treacherous to the news biz many, many times before.
Add to this the huge race to the bottom (they are charging 3 cents for their article, read my summary for 2 cents) and you quickly begin to see why micropayments have never taken off.
Finally, I wrote a blog post along these lines with more detail[0]. For those who disagree, ask yourselves; would you pay me 2 cents before you click that link.
The entire field of cryptography is about developing technical solutions to previously intractable social problems.
As I have described earlier, the race to the bottom is a feature, not a bug. It encourages other sites to mirror your content.
I would pay you 0.002 cents before clicking on that link. I already have to expend time and energy reading it, and I already pay for an internet connection to read it. If you put some sort of PoW firewall to deter AI scraping like many sites have been doing, I already have to expend money in the form of electricity to access the site.
The problem is that bottom in this case is “free, with ads.” As soon as you post your well researched expensive to produce content, I will summarise it and offer 90% of the experience for free. That’s if Google doesn’t do it first with AI summaries.
There are plenty of crypto projects that tried to do micropayments. They failed mainly due to technical reasons but if they had worked they still would not have gained traction - nobody wants micropayments.
1. Ad networks tend to benefit from having more data. There are economies of scale for sites like Youtube vs random pop-up video hosts that would want to mirror youtube videos, for example. The "bottom" may still be a micropayments system because they're easier to deploy.
2. It's possible that the entire ad economy is destroyed anyways through the use of adblockers, which is increasing. Hence google's push for WEI and the general industry push for TC and such. As long as none of these mechanisms of client authentication are able to take over the web, the profitability for ad networks will dry up.
Absent micropayments, there will be other attempts to introduce sybil resistance to the web, due to threats like AI scraping. Currently people are deploying PoW-based solutions, because they are the lowest effort (they can be implemented by polyfill). I imagine a hybrid PoW/micropayments system could emerge where PoW mining shares could be used interchangeably with micropayments. Basically each website acts as a cryptocurrency mining pool, so the website gets some reward in the mean.
I think the main failure of micropayments lies in the integration with the web browser, it needs some sort of plugin where HTTP 402 is effortless to interact with. It goes without saying that if you don't build it, they won't come.
There is not really a "killer app" yet. Some attempts in the bitcoin community like nostr and stacker.news are marginally used (but only to facilitate bitcoin dork-to-dork communication), and there have been some experiments in live-streaming and gaming. But nothing stands out. The barrier to entry of any app that requires putting money in, even a small amount, is naturally very high. A hybrid PoW/micropayment system is promising because it has the lowest barrier to entry.
On the technical side, you have tradeoffs between the complexity of using the app (especially with bitcoin payment channels) and decentralization. I don't regard it as an intractable problem.
The social problem is that most internet users are short-sighted and don't care about decentralization. They are just looking at some new company/service to throw their money into and escape their current service provider, which creates the problem they are running from. See: users fleeing twitter for bluesky, users fleeing streaming services after fleeing cable.
So pretty much any solution with a tradeoff between complexity and decentralization will suffer compared to a totally centralized and simple solution.
The decentralization of the new system needs to enable some new feature to get a foothold. Facilitating piracy is one such example, it could be the "killer app" for micropayments. Sites like Anna's archive already have some sort of cryptocurrency donation mechanism.
For example, I would say that the credit card system is essentially subsidized through other forms of payment via transaction fees/cashback (I can go into detail why I think this is the case, if you would like). This is a mechanism that benefits the credit card companies at the users of other payment mechanisms (cash, crypto, etc.). So this mechanism of the credit card payment system has the effect of strengthening it against competition.
Secondly, I am not even sure if it's a negative externality. It depends on how fraud is handled in the conventional banking system and who takes the blame. Let's say that the charge-back goes all the way to the exchange, so now the exchange that facilitated the transaction is down both X cryptocurrency and Y dollars. In order to be profitable, the exchange needs to charge more in fees and needs to spend more in surveillance to counteract fraud. So ultimately the users of the exchange would pay for fraud.
Lastly, it is important to differentiate the two sources of fraud. There is the fraud inside of the micropayments system, where I pay 0.01 cents to view a webpage and I don't receive what I want. That's a very low-risk fraud, and by gaining a fraction of a cent, they can lose like 100x that in potential business through micropayments.
Then there is the fraud that happens at the border of "hard" money (cash/precious metals/crypto) and "soft" chargeback-able money in the conventional credit card system. This is pretty much facilitated just by these hard forms of money existing and being exchangeable with soft money. I would argue the weakness lies in the insecurity of the soft money systems (specifically the outdated systems of authentication). But you could still apply some sort of limit to the amount of money a single bank account can exchange for crypto (say, $20 a day) without hurting the micropayments system, because the payments involved are so small. So the risk of fraud at the exchange could be much lower for this specific use-case of cryptocurrency.
The most obvious one that comes to mind is someone gets a script to run on your browser that loads a ton of the attackers 1 cent paywall articles. Any legitimate financial tool needs a way to roll back fraudulent transactions.
Its a social problem and all it takes is one player breaking through. People have done this with far far worse things that people thought were unviable socially. Microbetting, microloans, gaming microtransactions, hardware subscriptions,
Sites like the internet archive are already funded by donations from viewers like you. I see the scheme as essentially spreading out the donations based on who uses the most bandwidth. It makes it easier for anyone to spin up a mirror of archive.org, and it makes it more secure for sites like archive.org to accept donations.
I agree that some (most?) applications of micropayments are really gimmicky. But some applications are naturally suited to micropayments. The advantage of micropayments is that you can interact with ad-hoc vendors without setting up a pre-existing financial trust-relationship. For example, you could be at an bus terminal and have several pop-up vendors for wifi or electricity that charge per MB or per watt-hour. It enables competition.
The more gimmicky applications you mention like hardware subscriptions all involve some element of vendor-lock in that prohibits the advantage of micropayments systems in dealing with ad-hoc vendors. This is more analogous to those in-flight wifi services on airplanes: there is an established financial relationship with the airline and no competition, so there's little use for the low-risk micropayments.
What about Blendle? They had NYT, WaPo and WSJ as launch partners in 2014 but give up on micropayments in 2023 citing "very low demand"
Or Flattr. Or Invisibly. Or Pico. Or Brave's goofy crypto token. Or Coil. The Washington Post themselves experimented with cheap "day passes" a few years ago but I guess they didn't work well enough to keep. Arguably Medium's rev share program was another failed attempt. Heck no less a content middleman powerhouse than Apple tried and mostly failed to do a rev share / micropayments scheme with Apple News.
I was very happy with my Apple News subscription because it has every English-language newspaper I've come across.
https://www.theverge.com/2024/4/19/24135011/twitter-alternat...
which had startup royalty behind it and a very slick web site that they didn't promote very well. (A friend of mine who is interested in this space didn't find out about it until it was announced it was shutting down.)
I can only guess that the New York Times, WaPo and such were too good to talk to these people because they only managed to sign up third-tier news sources.
But I’m really curious how bad the free experience would have to become before people are open to paying a pittance?
The problem is that the horrendousness doesn’t drive people to pay, it drives them to social media.
And a big part of this is that local papers consider their online presence secondary to print. So paying will get you a physical newspaper and unlimited access to the worst site in the world
A real problem is that most of the fact-oriented sources are paywalled, while the polemic sites, especially on the hard right, are free. Fox News and X are free, but the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal are paywalled.
On the web, he mentions that a micropayment platform that solves the Sign In problem would be useful... well, Sign In with Ethereum / Metamask exists, but it's still too much to ask for people to use it. One wedge issue coming down the pike that may force this is mandatory age verification, since most websites will need to outsource that.
I for one would prefer something entirely anonymous and cash-like. I don't need my preferences to be on file with god-knows-which data vendors to form profiles on me just because I liked a stupid article one time enough to give the author a dollar.
The news is toxic propaganda, and nothing more. Nothing actionable.
Avoid at all costs.
When I see the "$1 introductory offer" I just think they are trying to trick me.
(this is a big part of my consumption, and is combined with scrolling HN/reddit headlines; often to paywalled sites, which leads me to mostly reading comment discussions on those two sites)
(edit: disclaimer after reading a few other comments: I use Android; so don't have personal experience with Apple News, which may in fact be significantly different/better product)
- give up capitalism for information, and rely on UBI and gov grants for art and media
- make the market great again with micropayments and subscriptions
Both of these have problems, but also both are better than ads, which have been an unmitigated disaster.
Pretty much every damn publisher.
Nobody who wants to build a stable business would want to depend on micropayments.
Such a system would be a race to the bottom, just like garnering "Facebook likes" and similar "virality" is a failing proposition. (And look at what happened to companies like Buzzfeed, who were focused on just this.)
We have a huge problem in our society, of people not valuing journalism, and not wanting to pay for it. Here on HN you regularly see people attempt to actively subvert copyright (by linking to "archive sites"), in addition to the constant drip of criticism when publishers do things to try to build their business, such as collect email addresses, use paywalls, etc.
Publishers need reliable, stable, income, not the lottery type system that would come from micropayments. They need to be paid to do journalism, not write articles that convince people to spend "coins" on them.
Fortunately, publishers are actually figuring out how to build stable businesses. There's still a lot of work to do, especially in terms of local journalism, but it's clear that there is no future for micropayments, based on what seems to actually work.
And please, I beg you, set aside a budget to support journalists, and spend it.
I'm honestly not sure why this isn't the standard. It solved all my news problems and fills all my news needs.
I'm honestly not sure what these tiny news sites that have paywalls are thinking. The chances of me paying a monthly fee for news from a single source, let alone a tiny, local, single source, are less than zero.
I would be willing to pay for content, but not for an aggregator.
It's almost certainly going to get enshittified eventually, but more than that, it purposely pushing a false "Left vs Right" narrative about news. That's part of the problem.
Also the way they summarize every story into just a few bullet points (which, if it isn't already written by AI, surely will be) IMO is actively downplaying important issues, in an attempt to defuse false energy in reporting of less important issues. Artificially downplaying serious stuff is as detrimental as artificially overplaying non-serious stuff.
The Google Pixel "news" feed has the same problem now that it does AI "summaries"
Like it's great that they aggregate a lot and show you articles from publications you wouldn't otherwise see, but I just cannot trust them in the future.
Fact-checkers and whatever you call people that gauge political biases aren't impartial sources of information. Someone pays their bills and those people typically have agendas besides delivering objective truth.
I'm not suggesting that paying monthly fees or paywalls are a solution to the problem either.
The real solution is to stop reading the news IMO. Let these companies go out of business and get replaced by something better. If one must read the news, just use an aggregator and archive.is for bypassing paywalls.
We already know the way. It's the cable/streaming model.
You pay for a single monthly subscription and get access to substantially all of the major news content.
What would need to happen for this to be possible? Cooperation between most of the major news outlets. Not cooperation in an anti-competitive sense, but willingness to participate in this sort of business model.
I'm a former news editor and left the industry because the business side couldn't figure out a viable business model.
I realize and feel deeply the loss we experience (especially at the local and state level) when quality journalism dies out, and I would love for the industry to recover.
But they're not going to do it unless they recognize that single-site subscriptions (or micropayment transactions) aren't going to cut it.
A music-streaming style option, where the user's monthly payment is distributed in proportion to the articles they read, might be better. (Although not without it's own issues)
The music model worked because a heavyweight like apple was able to come in and negotiate with a huge number of labels while simultaneously allowing access to unlabeled content. That expanded with Spotify, though they got there by effectively stealing the music for as long as possible until they were established.
I can't see how that'd work with news. Especially since so many of the news outlets exist and have been created to run propaganda for the owners. A decent number of them are effectively just funded by billionaires that want to push their agendas.
Is it the same subscription fee no matter what publications I read or how many articles? (If it varies directly based on what I'm reading then I think it is just micropayments.)
Publications with healthy subscription revenue like WSJ or the Economist are not going to be interested in participating unless they get paid a lot of money and/or can be assured it somehow will not cannibalize their direct sales.
Who owns the customer relationship? Publishers have been burned pretty much 100% of the time they cede that direct relationship to someone else.
Also, it's been tried: see Scroll, Apple News, Flattr, Coil, Brave BAT...
Micropayments are friction, and if you put friction on top of the work of discovery, I will do something else with my time.
Also, how's the deal between the distributor and the news outlets? Do you get paid according to views or is it a flat fee?
But also, yeah, I do think the streaming financial incentives affect what music gets written and produced. Just not necessarily anything to do with cuss words.
That's why streaming services also failed. Imagine Beatles and gangster rap and heavy metal being on the same music platform? Fans would never accept that!
Subscriptions is a loyalty game. Convince users of your value and get them to commit to becoming a supporter for an extended period. Get them to install an app, accept breaking news alerts and lean on you as a trusted source.
Micropayments is neither. There's no obvious path to generate consistent micropayment revenue. Maybe for like long-form features, but not for daily newsrooms.
The real blocker has always been payment rails, not willingness. Credit card processing makes anything under ~$0.30 economically irrational. Lightning Network and L2 stablecoins have changed that math completely — sub-cent transactions with near-zero fees are live today.
The bundling debate is a red herring. What killed micropayments in 2005 was Visa minimums, not user psychology. Now that the infrastructure exists for actual sub-penny settlement, the experiment deserves a rerun with modern rails.
I enjoy reading thorough publications written by actual humans who have something to say. Part of why I'm here. And I'd take micropayments over subscriptions anytime.
There's just one catch nobody seems to be eager to talk about. While I'm willing to pay that 1¢, if it's 1¢ + any identifying information, I'm out.
Information wants to be free.
I can think of many marketing formulas that would definitely work but since the game is not legwork but propaganda the industry should just die.
not to mention that they're fundamentally incompatible with the american credit card cabal, which forces you into buying some goofy monopoly money that you're likely to overspend on regularly
in the US there's no easy way to implement them without essentially buying a bulk of nonsense tokens, because the american banking system is complete garbage and still doesn't have a good peer-to-peer payment system without credit card processing fees that make microtransactions too expensive
It's a shame with articles like this that are otherwise insightful, they just lose me with sentences like that.
Like, if you don't have enough insight to recognize that bullshit is a general political issue, and has been forever, how can I rely on any other analysis you make?
It tends to go something like, if not micropayments then ads, if not ads then subscriptions. And people dislike subscriptions more than ads, and ads more than micropayments so the conclusion is micropayments.
But I don't like the way ads are presented as inevitable. Usually in some alarmist fashion listing all the stuff that would work should this revenue cease.
Ads are a way for the incumbent to seek rent, the eventual return on investment after destroying all alternatives.
So don't complain to me what will happen when I decline to download ads over _my_ network, send tracking from _my_ devices, show them on _my_ screens. When people start listing the giants that will topple the only word that crosses my mind is
Good.
If internet advertising was more like newspaper advertising, I wouldn't feel quite so compelled to go out of my way to block it. But no, someone somewhere along the way decided it had to be actively distracting, and track those impressions, and the industry just can't help itself. It's rotten to the core.
I don't think I'll ever stop using an adblocker. Even if ads would become less annoying or if it would become illegal to use an adblocker or something.
But no, that is how we got here. Internet ads were novel until they were just irritating.
There is no natural law that ads will go away. Ads will only disappear if their presence would make the company lose more customers than they gain on ads. Ads make them money. If people don't mind it so much to abandon the service/website, there will be ads. Publications are businesses and want to maximize profits. They don't just want to cover some fixed ongoing costs, like hosting and journalist salaries. As a business they use the available tools to make more profits. There is no "enough" in business.
The only thing that can be in some cases it's influencing the content and the creator not providing genuine content because conflict of interest
What people dislike are mountains of javascript that track everything you do across broad swathes of the internet and then sell that to businesses and governments that are effectively engaging in mass psychological experiments on us.
You open a link, you get a full screen ad, and have to wait 10 seconds or more. When you finally can close the ad, a popup appears asking if you want to subscribe to their newsletter. you close that too. A cookie banner reminds you that they care about your privacy, that's why they share your details with 1000+ partners. When you find the hidden button to say that you don't accept finally the article appears, but the bottom half is occupied by an overlay with a video ad. All the while the page scrolls terribly because of the amount of javascript loaded.
Or, sometimes, you get ad, cookie banner and then they tell you that you have to pay to access the content.
I suspect that if people had to choose between ads without tracking and tracking without the ads, they would choose the latter.
That said, we 100% don't land some advertisers when they learn they can't run 3rd party tracking or even 3rd party verification.
I've bought things from those ads because they're targeting the demographic on that site, not targeting me specifically. They're actually more relevant.
Now that's not probably sustainable, but I have to imagine that the roi for the advertisers is higher than general targeted ads. I've never even clicked on one of those except by accident.
Clicking a link on the web is not tacit permission to endlessly surveil me. Viewing a blog post is not informed consent to be tracked. Even a cookie banner isn't informed consent.
While I never enjoyed magazine or television ads I never minded them. Some were even useful and introduced me to a product I ended up wanting/needing. They also didn't track me all over the web. I don't mind ads, I do mind surveillance.
Then they went onto the web and were forced to prioritize, but where the entire bundling idea falls apart is you’re suggesting that we bundle the bundles.
Here’s the harsh reality: most news is already priced appropriately for the value that it delivers to most people, and for most people, most news is worth $0.00.
I pay for the news I want to read already, both websites and podcasts, and I pay directly for it. But no matter how many New York Times or USA Today or other random news links my friends send me, or whatever else I run into on the open web when I’m checking someone’s sources, I will never pay greater than $0.00 for it. Not $0.99, $0.01, not $0.001, not even $0.0001. If I have to engage in a financial transaction just for clicking a link, then I’m not clicking the link and I’ll start demanding that citations to be delivered to me in a form I can read instead, and probably stop providing links in turn. Other people will do the same.
And for those rare publications that people both want to read and also are willing to pay for en masse? Stuff like the Wall Street Journal? They’re never going to devalue themselves by getting in the bundle. Even with Apple News which famously has a partnership with the WSJ specifically, they withhold their most valuable stories, the stuff that people buy the Wall Street Journal for because they’re the value drivers in any potential partnership. Almost every other publication that would stand to benefit would in effect be free-riding off the WSJ’s largesse.
I’m going to go out on a feedback shaped limb and say that demanding things like this from friends isn’t an appealing trait. If they are suggesting it to you, that’s not enough to justify 1/100th of a cent?
Brother.
Read what they send you or don’t, and by all means communicate your preferences, but saying that you’re not going to share with others in retaliation is… I mean it’s definitely a vibe!
But the truth is, that would grate on people, and not just with me and mine, but for everyone if we all had to engage in financial transactions to read the links that are shared with us or posted on the web. So people would just stop sharing links. I’d think twice before sending someone a link, and others would as well. We’d probably just swap to copying the whole article in another form and sharing that instead, but the extra steps would reduce the amount we would be willing to share over time cuz trading PDFs we have to generate ourselves is not as much fun as trading links.
Or would you still hold your opinions even in a theoretical landscape where paying $0.01 is just consenting to that amount being deducted from your bank account, with no friction or danger?
If they value it at more than that, they will pay for it.
If you really value the information contained in these articles at $0.00, then neither would you spend that much more valuable resource—time—in order to digest it, even if it were given to you for free.
So I don't think you're hung up about the actual financial cost in this analysis. You're either like most people, who simply don't want to deal with the rigmarole of patiently providing payment info to a hundred different vendors who will act irresponsibly with your data, or you have some purely symbolic and emotional connection to the notion that you're providing exactly zero dollars and zero cents to your enemies.
The rest can be worth my time, sometimes, under limited circumstances, but usually it isn’t. Like who here can say that all of the links they’ve clicked on throughout their lifetime have been valuable, and haven’t just been time wasters?
If you put a financial cost on links though, people just won’t pay. And they won’t click links. We might waste less time too, but just because something got my time doesn’t mean I’m going to also give it money for having had the privilege of my time.
So, consumers are left with some amount of surplus. The horror.
A small correction: I am a potential customer, at least in the general sense. I am someone that subscribes to news publications as I already pointed out. Who I pay in any given month is not set in stone, and the news market is still somehow strangely dynamic with new options replacing old ones all the time.
But if I’m paying, then it’s a subscriber-provider relationship; not a virtual bazaar transaction made by clicking a link.
I wouldn't pay .000001 cents either. If they did charge this way the amount of generated clickbait titles would surpass anything we've seen before. At least now they have to backup the clickbait title with content that causes you to stay longer for more ads with micropayments they already took your money.
Journalism micropayments have been tried many times before, and never worked. Things haven't substantially changed in the meantime, so what would be different this time? I'm genuinely curious, I'm a journalist, so I'd really love to find a working funding model for quality media.
For one, you have a request. The answer isn't going to be anywhere else. Sure, you can't be guaranteed the quality in advance, but you are guaranteed to not have an answer without submitting the request. This doesn't work in a field where so many see news as commoditized, and can just get a free article or headline elsewhere.
Micropayments have been tried over and over (see https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/08/the-poster-child-for-micro...)
Some of this issue is the nature of news. With an LLM, the providers just run the infrastructure anyway, and your request is routed to it. They develop new models constantly, and deploy. News does not work like this.
If you have to grab someone's attention to read an article, that's an incentive structure that creates clickbait and other things people hate. You may offer a headline, but that is very often the only part of the story people care about. (Oh, Robert Duvall died? That's sad. But I don't need to pay anything to read anymore -- I already know the story!)
It also does nothing for the piracy that is so rampant -- especially on this site. How many people post archive links to articles with paywalls? Would that stop? Getting a fraction of a cent or so before someone else copies the article is absolutely not a business model.
The entire thing is held together through third party legal fictions that do the law enforcement as a pre-req of doing business. The government, and by extension the populace, would have to accept the intractibility of chasing down criminal financial networks were any sort of micropayment framework ever able to exist outside the regulatory regime.
It's a perennial dream of the up and coming technologist, who has not been exposed to enough humanity to understand we can't have nice things. Sorry to be yet another buster of bubbles. I was you-adjacent once. Then I actually worked at a money transmitting firm. Boy, did that come with some reality checks.
Possibly this happened because a) the vendors only offered a micropayment model and b) the product was so popular that nobody pushed back.
That said we can see LLM inference being sold on a subscription basis commonly now (e.g. Claude Code).
You could buy and sell virtual items with a real-world cost far smaller than the transaction fees of a regular card transaction.
Speaking of which - that, to my mind, is the definition of a micropayment - a payment too small to be practical to administer using existing card payment infrastructure. So-called "micropayments" in games have long since ceased to qualify under that definition - they're just "transactions" now.