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A decade of free online news subsidized by the dying gasp of the news industry has set us up perfectly for this. Going forward, that subsidization will finish

• Kadin 7y ago
  Or, you know, stuff people are willing to pay for. WaPo and NYT, among others, have seemingly done okay after paywalling their content (with admittedly relaxed rules to preserve inbound hits from Google, Twitter, etc.). The real problem is the lack of a payments infrastructure that doesn't have tremendously high fees for small amounts, especially small recurring payments. I'm willing to pay for a WaPo subscription upfront, for a year, and that makes the credit card fees acceptable on their end. But the amount I'm willing to pay for other sites is smaller, and that probably makes it prohibitive for them to accept credit cards directly, and there's no other good standard way of getting paid. Ironically Google is in the best position to do micropayments (hell they could even do impression-based micropayments!) because it's not too dissimilar from their ad-revenue billing. But of course they won't, because they're an advertising company. But the faster we kill ads, which basically means the more people who use adblockers, the more market pressure will be created for someone to act as a clearinghouse for small payments between content creators and consumers. And the stuff that people aren't willing to pay for, won't be created, or will be created only if it's someone's hobby or scratches their creative itch.