> The rise of the paid newsletter and the prominence of the paywall leads me to be a little less cynical about the prospect of micropayments. I don't think of

> The rise of the paid newsletter and the prominence of the paywall leads me to be a little less cynical about the prospect of micropayments. I don't think of these as micropayments, whether the user-must-click-each-time or service-calculates-distribution types. These are bog standard subscriptions to a single publisher. The idea of upselling to subscription is interesting, but a big part of how broad publications like a newspaper work is to bundle a number of things together that different audiences want into a single economic unit that can charged at a higher price. A user who can get only and exactly what they wanted at a lower price will do so. What I believed when I started was that there was an in-between audience who weren't served - those who wouldn't subscribe but who would pay for individual consumption if it was frictionless. I did a lot of work on how that could be achieved across multiple websites without needing a central aggregator (even to the point of obtaining a patent on part of the technology). But so many efforts, like Flattr and many others, came and went that I've come to view the whole idea as a tarpit.