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One way to do it would be that the first time I visit a proper article on guardian.com (not something 5 lines long which would acts as a loss leader), I get tol

One way to do it would be that the first time I visit a proper article on guardian.com (not something 5 lines long which would acts as a loss leader), I get told "indepth articles cost 20p. Click to authorise upto £2 (dropdown for ". Then I don't get asked until after I've read 10 in depth articles. The payment site would have to track if I've read that article before to avoid recharging me, but that's fine, I'd agree to that (if I don't agree then I have to pay each time). I could get a monthly statement, and clear my past logs from a trivial interface (wipe this artcile, wipe this site, wipe all older than x days, etc) I hit "yes" or "no", and don't hear about it until I've read those 20 articles. Something built into my browser could act as the middle man, taking 10% of that fee and sending the rest to the article's creator. Firefox could put in an infrastructure to plug in easilly enough. You could even allow payment via bitcoin to get VCs happy.

amelius 8y ago
Yes, but then you get scam sites which show 1 decent article and trick you into paying for garbage.
- isostatic 8y ago
  In which case you'd blacklist the site. You'd pay for the first article (you're paying right now through your consumption of brainwashing), but you wouldn't fall for that twice.
scarejunba 8y ago
I'm going to be honest with you: I would never use a website that used this service. I would just close the tab. I suspect most people would too. I don't have the patience to be thinking about authorizing spend every time I click a link.
- ghaff 8y ago
  That was Clay Shirky’s argument years ago during the first round of micropayments startups. While we do deal with micropayments in one sense every time we flip on a light switch and used to do so for phone calls, it feels different somehow for reading articles. We don’t want to have to ask ourselves if something is worth 10 cents every time we click a link.

amelius 8y ago

Yes, but then you get scam sites which show 1 decent article and trick you into paying for garbage.

isostatic 8y ago
In which case you'd blacklist the site. You'd pay for the first article (you're paying right now through your consumption of brainwashing), but you wouldn't fall for that twice.

scarejunba 8y ago

I'm going to be honest with you: I would never use a website that used this service. I would just close the tab. I suspect most people would too. I don't have the patience to be thinking about authorizing spend every time I click a link.

ghaff 8y ago
That was Clay Shirky’s argument years ago during the first round of micropayments startups. While we do deal with micropayments in one sense every time we flip on a light switch and used to do so for phone calls, it feels different somehow for reading articles. We don’t want to have to ask ourselves if something is worth 10 cents every time we click a link.