The problem is that some people would prefer to pay with a subscription, and others with micropayments. If two vendors compete between these options, the resul

The problem is that some people would prefer to pay with a subscription, and others with micropayments. If two vendors compete between these options, the result is a natural price war with a price of zero. Given that subscriptions are generally more profitable for the provider, we should expect subscriptions to dominate over micropayments. This argument is from https://www-users.cse.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/price.war.pdf https://www-users.cse.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/price.war.pdf and is one of the few economic analyses from the dawn of the web age that has proven truly prescient. To quote another of Odlyzko's papers from several years later, "Micropayments are the payment method of the future, and always will be."