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I was pondering this earlier today while manually prepending archive.is to a pay walled link on my Android phone for the umpteenth time today. The micro-transa

• nlawalker 1y ago
  I’d even pay a respectable amount more than that, but it needs to take like 3 seconds tops with no typing. Heck, the faster it is, the more likely I’d be to impulse buy more content from the same place. I’d be fine with some up front work to create an account and associate a payment method or something, but not on each individual site. PayPal pretty much fits the bill for me for most transactions, where is PayPal for microtransactions?
  • SpaceNoodled 1y ago
    BRB gonna make Superman 3 money
  • greyface- 1y ago
    In addition to being frictionless, it needs to be anonymous - if the publisher ends up receiving my full name, email address, phone number, and/or postal address, then I'll continue to choose piracy.
    • salawat 1y ago
      Congratulations. You've proposed something dead on arrival in our current regulatory regime. You can't have financial transfers like that. Only criminals want/need that. What are you, some sort of money launderer? No electronic funds transfer without that transparency of origin, says the man in Washington.
      • greyface- 1y ago
        That's why we have to destroy the present politico-economic system.
        • dyauspitr 1y ago
          There’s plenty of destruction going on and it doesn’t look like a brighter future.
        • robocat 1y ago
          The present system seems perfectly capable of destroying itself without our help.
          • greyface- 1y ago
            I was (somewhat obliquely) quoting Arthur C. Clarke from 1969. It's been 56 years, and in that time the present system has yet to come close to destroying itself.
            • robocat 1y ago
              You can not say it hasn't come close yet: that is not measurable. How many brinks have there been in the last 56 years, is surely undefinable because we don't know the effects of quantum butterflies in the counterfactual timeline. We might be able to say it hasn't destroyed itself yet? And what is meant by the "present system" is unclear. Plus the present system cannot be the past system so your choice of words is kinda weird! Sorry, pedantic nitpicking can be a hobby. I don't like this comment.
      • tobr 1y ago
        I guess you’re being sarcastic, but I think it’s perfectly fine that only the middleman handling the transaction and skimming off the top knows who the customer is. Plenty of systems like that around.
        • ruined 1y ago
  • cco 1y ago
    I'd love it if a wallet in my Chrome browser would let websites show me a prompt (paywall) that would charge me some small number of cents. Hold down for two seconds to pay. A dream. Too bad crypto fees make this as untenable as credit cards.
    • jdminhbg 1y ago
      > Too bad crypto fees make this as untenable as credit cards. Nah, you can send USDC for less than a tenth of a penny now: https://tokentool.bitbond.com/gas-price/base https://tokentool.bitbond.com/gas-price/base The issue is getting people to actually get over the hump of deciding to send money to someone.
      • tim333 1y ago
        I wouldn't mind sending 10c or some such but have never in ~30 years of internet use been offered that. It's all "sign up now for $1/month! (smallprint: after first month it's $29/mo billed annually up from and a pain to cancel)"
    • janandonly 1y ago
      You clearly never “zapped” a few says before via any Nostr client.
  • sandspar 1y ago
    This is what ads promised to be. Ads are the automatic, frictionless wallet that we all dreamed of. But the market countered them in various ways so we're back to being stuck.
    • close04 1y ago
      > This is what ads promised to be ... But the market countered them Not at all, this assessment is either revisionist history or completely misses what OP is asking for and what ads are. When you pay for an article with money you know exactly what you're in for, you don't just click and then hope the site doesn't take too much. Ads as a form of payment are completely outside the reader's control. You have to commit to pay a price before knowing what the price is. The site can display any number of them, they come attached to a lot of tracking, they can be absolutely offensive or obnoxious, they increase data usage, and maybe worst of all they can be dangerous malware. Nobody blocked ads when they were just a few static gif banners on websites. And if money was abused today like ads are, you'd be up in arms. But instead you're defending the abusive travesty that ads turned out to be, and blaming "the market" (as in the users, not the ads industry) for rejecting them.
    • horsawlarway 1y ago
      This is not at all what ads are... Ads are an incentive structure that ruins content by making the true customer a company that wants to run an ad, not the person consuming the content. That's an untenable conflict of interest for the publishing party, because it means they're actually in the business of selling eyeballs and clicks to those companies, not selling media for me to choose to consume. All the incentives are wrong, and it shows in the content produced and optimized for this payment method.
    • JohnFen 1y ago
      And it might have been a decent compromise had ad companies not taken a maximally hostile stance toward people in terms of spying, intrusiveness, and etc.
    • Workaccount2 1y ago
      Let me remind people that ABP (ad block pro) the OG ad blocker, collapsed and gave rise to uBlock because ABP understood that the internet would go to shit if no one viewed ads, so they tried to strike a truce between users and ad companies. The users decided to go the "why are you negotiating with the enemy? Block everything!" route and ABP was done for.
  • rebeccaskinner 1y ago
    Several years ago I (briefly) worked at a startup that was trying to do this for publishing (but has since pivoted into generic ad-tech). My impression at the time was that most publishers weren’t onboard. True or not, they seemed to think if you’d pay a penny for an article then you might but a subscription and so they want you to make an account, want your contact info so they can send you spam, etc. The other issue is that big name publishers saw micropayments as eating into their subscription revenue and weren’t interested, but without them it was hard to put together a compelling enough bundle of sites to overcome the signup friction for users. I still think it’s a good idea but I don’t see how you overcome those obstacles.
    • matthewmacleod 1y ago
      I think the only way that will ever come about is an implementation by an existing incumbent. Like, let's say Apple added some kind of web microtransaction support – essentially every user already has payment details registered with Apple, and a tiny "pay 10¢ to read this article" banner would likely to be easy to implement result in almost zero friction for the user.
      • netsharc 1y ago
        I guess it needs to have the YouTube Premium/Netflix model, you pay a subscription per month, and reading articles don't cost anything any more, but the provider pays the publisher some of the cents out of your subscription fee. Obviously limits need to be built, otherwise the heavy readers will drain the provider's bank account...
      • majewsky 1y ago
        Except it's actually 13 cents because of the Apple tax.
    • BariumBlue 1y ago
      True that's a good point - if publishers were OK with micro purchases for their articles, we'd see some publishers try that out. Nothing's stopping the NYT and similar from trying a "pay as you go model". The fact that publishers haven't experimented with that implies they're not interested, which dooms any project like this from the start.
• Spivak 1y ago
  Are you sure you want an incentive structure that directly financially rewards rage bait? At least with ads they want to keep you on the page longer.
  • Simulacra 1y ago
    fool me once shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me. If the article from a publication turns out to be junk, I'm never paying for it again. I'll gravitate towards sources I prefer. It would actually be a boon for the major newspapers.
  • hereme888 1y ago
    Good point. And others will tip to confirm their bias. Still others will tip based on quality. However overall it would be an increase of "free market", and what people ask for with their $, people will get more of. Still much better than not knowing if half the news you read are part of a coordinated political agenda.
    • MarkusQ 1y ago
      If that's what's bothering you, I can put your mind at ease by pointing out the absurdity of our world today. Half the news you read is, in fact, part of a coordinated political agenda. Once you've absorbed that and come to terms with it emotionally, you're ready for the punchline: so's the other half.
      • hereme888 1y ago
        Sure both sides can have either an agenda or incorrect facts. But micro-payments should incentivize a high quality product. For example I typically don't read or watch MSM. But with the recent Middle East conflict the most up-to-date information is through mainstream channels.
    • usefulcat 1y ago
      > Still much better than not knowing if half the news you read are part of a coordinated political agenda. I don't see how micro transactions would address that issue in any meaningful way.
• ProllyInfamous 1y ago
  I was just discussing this, earlier today, with a fellow on HackerNews: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=ProllyInfamous#44368433 https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=ProllyInfamous#44368... Apparently, our pennies aren't wanted?
• calebh 1y ago
  There used to be an app called Blendle that I used for this purpose. Nowadays I just instantly go to archive.is, so I guess nobody wants my microtransactions.
  • janandonly 1y ago
    Blendle was the bom. Alexander sold it to a big French conglomerate and now you just buy a subscription via them. The old model of pay-per-view is dead once again. Although, it’s alive and kicking on the new decentralised social media platform of Nostr. It’s called “zapping” and it’s great fun when you get a few cents for a quote, meme or even a re-share of a good post that you dug up ;-)
    • jeroenhd 1y ago
      The subscription model happened before the sale; Blendle wasn't profitable. News conglomerates like DPG Media leaving the platform to set up their own payment plans also didn't help. I think it would've succeeded here had the news industry not collapsed into a few megacompanies.
• mgiampapa 1y ago
  Why not just have an extension on your phone's browser that does this automatically for you? Firefox still lives!
  • jeroenhd 1y ago
    That's how flattr used to work. Like all well-intentioned attempts to pay creators, it collapsed because people lost interest.
• creinhardt 1y ago
  Having worked in this space from the publisher side for a bit, I can tell you that many paywall vendors tried the micro transaction approach, and the friction level was just too high for it to ever catch on at the scale needed to sustain a business. Definitely too much for a local newspaper or tv station site, the juice was never worth the squeeze.
  • bruce511 1y ago
    Very much this. I can see some number of people are happy to pay a few cents to read something. I'm guessing it's a minority, but hey it's something. Problem though is that the first transaction is really expensive in time and effort. Download the payments app, sign up, register credit card, seed the account, install browser extension etc. All this assuming I know the payments system exists and assuming there's only 1 of them. So what was the article about? How could it possibly be enticing enough to make it worth this hassle? Sure, the second and later times it's easy (assuming the same micro-service is used, and assuming the paywall supports micro at all) but I never bother with the first so this gain is never there.
    • em-bee 1y ago
      this is why payment integrated into wechat is a success. everyone (in china) has wechat already, and sending a few cents worth is trivial. heck, you can even give money to beggars using wechat. and you don't even need to connect a bank account to get started. the problem is of course that outside of china we don't have that dominance of a single app that everyone already has. and we would need to build something federated to drive adoption, which is hard. (mobile payment in china is not federated. alternatives to wechat only work because of the country's huge population and because they are also popular for other reasons, like alibaba which was eventually able to build alipay because of that. and of course alibaba doesn't accept wechat pay.) i think a key feature for wechat pay gaining popularity was that it allows people to send money to each other, and therefore it was not dependent on service providers adopting it. it probably also helped that china has a culture of giving money as a gift. another approach is mobile money https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_Money https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_Money which apparently is popular in africa.
• protocolture 1y ago
  We really just need a good aggregator. Because with legislative arrangements like Australias, thats what Facebook and Twitter have become, just with advertising money paying the newsies instead. Pay some middle man in CASH MONEY to view 100 articles per month.
  • re-thc 1y ago
    > Because with legislative arrangements like Australias, thats what Facebook and Twitter have become No, in this example users using Facebook and Twitter are indirectly paying for this regardless of if they read the news there.
    • protocolture 1y ago
      They were forced to make private arrangements to pay various media companies what they thought their content was making on their platform. In aggregate its roughly the same.
      • re-thc 1y ago
        > In aggregate its roughly the same. That's like saying if you pay tax you already pay for everything since your tax dollars is always involved in some part of it. There's no separate section on Twitter or Facebook with said "news" with a separate charge. If I e.g. pay for a Twitter account I pay for it all. Unless there's an opt-out, as a user I'm paying for it. Whether I use it or not.
        • protocolture 1y ago
          >Unless there's an opt-out, as a user I'm paying for it. Whether I use it or not. I mean you would be "paying" just as much to facey even if the scheme wasn't in place.
  • jeroenhd 1y ago
    Blendle tried that here. It didn't work out for them; publishers wanted more money, competition disappeared because news publishers all congregated into three giant blobs. People registered, tried the app once, and then never put any money into the app again. Now they sell Netflix-style aggregate subscriptions. It's mostly gossip rags and magazines these days.
• shafyy 1y ago
  Feels like this could be a good opportunity for Apple Pay (or Google Pay) to offer a microtranscation service specifically for newspapers. They could offer an SDK so implementing it is easy on the newspaper side, and they could offer better terms for them so that it's actually worth charging 1 € without paying 0.90 € in transaction fees.
  • tacker2000 1y ago
    Actually i saw bloomberg doing this a couple of days ago, it was “subscribe for 1.99 a month” and you could use apple pay. [1] I thought then that they could also use this to just sell the articles for 0.49 or something, since it significantly reduces friction. But then again the proportional transaction fees for a small amount like this are probably too high. [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-06-23/tesla-robotaxi-videos-show-speeding-driving-into-wrong-lane?embedded-checkout=true https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-06-23/tesla-rob...
    • dyauspitr 1y ago
      It would have to be $0.05 an article. 50 cents is way too high.
      • jbverschoor 1y ago
        One of the reasons why mobile games sell game credits.
      • dmurray 1y ago
        Not at Bloomberg's end of the market. I'd happily click through some "see this article for $0.49" or even 1.99, but I won't subscribe to "1 month for 1.99" because I've been conditioned to expect that this will either start billing me 19.99 per month in perpetuity, or that it will take half an hour of my time to cancel, or both.
      • carlosjobim 1y ago
        How is your reasoning? If an article isn't even worth 50 cents, then why is it worth your time to read it? We only have limited time in this world, death is approaching swiftly.
• jillesvangurp 1y ago
  I think the Spotify model would be better. I don't want to micro manage my micro transactions. What I want is just pay 10$ a month. And then everything I want to read is readable. Let somebody else decide how split that 10$. Of course the problem with that is that Spotify isn't very fair about giving artists their cut. But that should be a fixable problem. BTW. That's 10$ more than anyone is getting right now. Every month. 120$/year. I haven't bought a news paper in decades, and I actually used to. I spend a lot of time reading online news. But individual news paper subscriptions don't have enough value to me. Most of the archive links I click on e.g. HN are a bit underwhelming in terms of what they have to say. That's because whenever any of them say something original and interesting (which isn't all that common), somebody else will publish the gist of that for free within minutes. And mostly it's the other way around and they are just repeating/summarizing what is already widely published. Which is not that valuable to me. LLMs can do that now; and I suspect those are widely used by everyone; including paywalled outlets.
  • StackRanker3000 1y ago
    This is a tangent from the original topic, but what do you see as unfair in how Spotify pays rightsholders? The problem as I understand it is that at the price users are willing to pay, and with the cut going to record labels, there are few artists that make enough from streaming to live on. However with the easy (and free) access to all of the world’s music that came with piracy, it’s difficult to imagine how the model of paying a substantial sum for one album or song at a time could’ve survived anyway Just like musicians and composers had other ways of making a living before records became a thing, music is now almost necessarily so cheap that most artists will need to supplement with other income streams, like concerts, merch, sponsorships, branded vodkas… I don’t think it’s the end of the world, there’s still more music being made today than ever before
• graemep 1y ago
  I think people might pay for micro-transactions, but a lot of news has no real value. The news mostly reports facts that are available from other sources. Pre-internet a lot of their content was rewrites of stuff pulled off news wires. The front few pages of a newspaper and opinion bits were genuinely their own content - but a lot of the former was available from the (many) sources that sent people to cover major events. People paid because they had limited choices. If you wanted to read the news it had to be a newspaper. Otherwise you could watch a limited number of TV channels or listen to the radio. Reporting was often inaccurate, and thanks to changes of ethos and cost pressures is probably worse (I am judging that bit from a UK perspective though) On top of that I doubt the value of keeping up with the news at all. Look at a news source you read regularly from an year ago and see how much of it you remember. Something more in-depth (a book, a blog post, a good analytical video) gives you a much better understanding of the world and those are also far more available. There are a very few places that have unique content that is worth reading, but these are not the typical news websites that replaced newspapers.
  • darkwater 1y ago
    So, why is even HN getting a lot of those non-original sources, many times even behind a paywall, on the front page? The answer IMO is easy, and we should have learnt it after over 30 years of Internet and World Wide Web growth: because there is still added value in some journalism (true journalism, we might call it?). Even if they are publishing something from a common source. Who reads the original news might have a better understanding of the topic, might be a better, clearer writer, can add context that makes sense for their audience etc etc
    • carlosjobim 1y ago
      Great point. That's how news should be read and how news should be presented. A filtering by the journalist to shorten, highlight, explain, and then a link to the complete and original source, so that interested readers can verify and dig deeper.
    • graemep 1y ago
      > So, why is even HN getting a lot of those non-original sources, many times even behind a paywall, on the front page? They are still a minority of sources, many of the newsy ones have non-paywalled articles. I may not notice some paywalls because I usually have JS off so a lot of paywalls do not work. They are also a pick of the most interesting articles. its a very small proportion of what is available. > Who reads the original news might have a better understanding of the topic, might be a better, clearer writer, can add context that makes sense for their audience Might! If you want original sources read Reuters - non-paywalled BTW. > because there is still added value in some journalism (true journalism, we might call it?). Good journalism is a rarity. It is, and has always, been far less common than sloppy, inaccurate, and sensationalist repporting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gell-Mann_amnesia_effect
• jeduardo 1y ago
  The Basic Attention Tokens from Brave were intended to work in a similar way: you could pre-purchase them and a fraction would be sent to an website when you accessed their page, in theory removing the need for paywalls. I thought it to be an interesting idea, but it'd only work as a replacement for subscriptions with a lot of people onboard, which depended not only on adoption for Brave. Matters of regulation and off-ramp of these tokens into the usual financial system were complicated, since they built the infrastructure on Ethereum and had to partner with an existing crypto exchange to get it running and vetted. Eventually they stopped supporting my country and I never looked into them again. archive.is ftw I guess
  • jeroenhd 1y ago
    https://flattr.com/ https://flattr.com/ used to have such a system without the cryptocurrency nonsense and it went about as far as you'd expect. On the other hand, it didn't falsely claim your funds were going to creators, so in that sense they're still a better alternative than whatever the hell Brave seems to be doing. I don't know why, but Brave's cryptocurrency doesn't even work in my country. Whatever regulation they're afraid off seems to make cryptocurrency micropayments a pretty bad system for paying for news.
• chii 1y ago
  > I'd be far more willing toss you a penny or two to read the content of a single article. yet empirically, most people wont. And a business model require it work for most people, not just a standout few like yourself. This is even accounting for a proper transaction cost reduction in microtransactions! The reason i say this is because microtransactions _do_ work in other areas - such as gacha games, in-app purchases etc (where the transaction costs have somewhat been minimized but not completely demolished).
  • kelnos 1y ago
    > yet empirically, most people wont. Empirically how? To my knowledge, there's never been a widespread micropayments system that targeted this use case. So how do we know? All we know is that publishers think micropayments would eat into their subscription revenue, and that they want readers to give them personal information so they can spam and track them (something that may not be possible with micropayments). So how do we know this, empirically? I don't think we do.
    • chii 1y ago
      > So how do we know this, empirically? as in, because the microtransactions mechanisms already exist, and has been successfully monetized in other areas. The fact that news publishers don't use it (and opt for subscribers instead) is an indication that it doesnt work.
      • mrguyorama 1y ago
        Well no, it's not necessarily an indication it "doesn't work", that's only one possible indication. It could also indicate that News companies make more money from a tiny number of subscribers than whoever would pay microtransactions, or it could indicate that the News companies BELIEVE that to be true whether it actually is or not. It could also indicate that the news "industry" has been utterly decimated and destroyed and defunded over the past 50 years and they don't really have the cashflow to play around and experiment with business strategies because they are desperately hanging on as it is and have all sorts of data showing them that they will never have the business they had 50 years ago no matter what because the simple reality is that humans prefer listening to a moronic talking head not ask hard questions over actual journalism anyway.
• pjc50 1y ago
  (reposting my standard comment when someone brings up micropayments again. Previously https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15592192 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15592192 ) Unsolved, difficult problems of micropayments: pay before viewing: how do you know that the thing you're paying for is the thing that you're expecting? What if it's a rickroll or goatse? so do you give refunds a la steam? pay and adverts: double-dipping is very annoying pay and adverts: how do you know who you're paying? A page appears with a micropayment request, but how do you know you've not just paid the advertiser to view their ad? pay and frame: can you have multiple payees per displayed page? (this has good and bad ideas) pay and popups: it's going to be like those notification or app install modals, yet another annoyance for people to bounce off pay limits: contactless has a £30 limit here. Would you have the same payment system suitable for $.01 payments and $1000 payments? How easy is it to trick people into paying over the odds (see refunds)? pay and censors: who's excluded from the payment system? Why? Part 2: business model problems! getting money into the system is plagued by usual fraud problems of stolen card transactions for pure digital goods nobody wants to build a federated system; everyone wants to build a Play/Apple/Steam store where they take 30% winner-take-all effects are very strong Play store et al already exist, why not use that? Yes it takes 30%, but how much does the micropayment system take? Free substitute goods are just a click away Consumers will pirate anything no matter how cheap the original is (although: Spotify) No real consumer demand for micropayments => lemma from previous 3 items: market for online goods is efficient enough to drive all marginal prices to zero existing problem of the play store letting your kid spend all the money Friction: it would be great if you didn't have to repeatedly approve things, such as a micropayment for every page of a webcomic archive. But blanket approval lets bad actors drain the jar or inattentive users waste it and then feel conned First most obvious model for making this work is porn, which is inevitably blacklisted by the payment processors, has a worse environment for fraud/chargebacks, and is toxic to VCs (see Patreon and even Craigslist) Internet has actually killed previously working "micropayment" systems such as Minitel, paid ringtones (anyone remember the dark era of Crazy Frog?); surviving ones like premium SMS and phone have a scammy, seedy feel. Accounting requirements: do you have to pay VAT on that micropayment? do you have to declare it? Is it a federal offence to sell something to an Iranian or North Korean for one cent?
  • 1y ago
• arrowsmith 1y ago
  > The micro-transaction proposals everyone cried about in the early 2000's would have been so much better than this. Would it? As you point out, this idea has been floating around for at least twenty years, and there have been several attempts to implement it, but it's never come even remotely close to taking off. If it was really such a good idea, it would surely be with us by now. "Better" for who?
  • kalaksi 1y ago
    I always find this kind of reasoning shallow or somewhat circular. Plenty of tech in history has been too much ahead of their time, bogged down by missing related tech, a larger movement or otherwise didn't just make it big until later.
  • AnthonyMouse 1y ago
    There have always been two main things preventing this from happening. The first is that you can't use credit cards for it because their fees are in the nature of "2.9% + $0.30" and it's the $0.30 that annihilates your ability to do $0.05 transactions. And the second is that people don't like to associate their identity with every little thing they do, so anything that requires them to is friction and any friction on top of a $0.05 transaction is fatal, but then all the payment systems require that. This one's the crazy irony because the alternative to it is ads, and then people complain about the intrusiveness of that because it tries to track them anyway, whereas what we want is the ability to pay for something with a trivial amount of money instead of being tracked.
    • Workaccount2 1y ago
      Let me take it one step further though. Many people, even having viewed ads, never really paid anything into the system. They just ignore the ads regardless of how perfectly tailored they are. Maybe we can say something about sub conscious influence or the like, but on the surface the internet is just a huge free playground for them. Or perhaps they bought products from ads, but it was just stuff they were looking to buy anyway. So they effectively get "free internet" just for buying a school laptop or power tool set. The downside to the ad model is all the privacy invasion, but being real for a second, the privacy invasion so far is scary because of hypothetical threats, not realized ones. For the vast majority of people who are tracked to hell and back, their is zero perceptible impact on their day to day life, while they get a bunch of free stuff for it. This is why the ad model will be near impossible to kill.
• pfdietz 1y ago
  Toss a coin to your paper, O browser of plenty.
• kalaksi 1y ago
  For me, the ideal setup would be simple micropayments with 1 or 2 confirmation clicks and absolutely no subscriptions or accounts required. Just a simple payment. Subscriptions as an alternative could be possible of course. But I don't enjoy managing accounts, spam or getting more of my details leaked.
  • sneak 1y ago
    You can do this with a centralized service that offers redeemable bearer tokens for arbitrary amounts that transfers a predefined amount from requester’s account to the redeemer’s account. The problem is that AML and KYC regulations around payments mean that only heavily regulated and licensed entities can process payments, and this is why the MC/Visa gross margins on processing transactions is like a billion percent or something (and why they have per-tx fee minimums which basically nuke the possibility of micropayments). Regardless of intent, the government is protecting their revenue streams. It’s illegal to build a frictionless and anonymous microtransactions system. They say it’s for AML purposes but I think the real reason the state wants 100% ID-based surveillance on all payments is because if you could make secret payments that they can’t observe, censor, and interdict, then you could raise and pay your own army, which is the main thing keeping the state the state - no other armies are allowed. Their monopoly on violence is anticompetitive. :)
  • martin_a 1y ago
    Flattr was exactly that. Was. Didn't work out in the end, I guess, but we'd all be better of with that...
• poulpy123 1y ago
  microtransactions are not doable with the fees of the overhead
• TheOtherHobbes 1y ago
  Micropayments are a constant financial stressor and source of friction. You're never quite sure how much you're going to consume/pay, you're constantly having to make a choice every time you read something, and there's no way to say "Actually that click wasn't worth 10c". Tiny local papers are mostly all owned by the same company anyway. People do actually pay for subscriptions or donations if they like the content enough. In the UK the Times, Financial Times, and Telegraph all run on subscriptions, and the Guardian is a weird - but successful - kind of donation-ware. Also Substack and Medium. The alternative is aggregation - like Spotify for news, but without the cutthroat ethics. Pay a fixed amount, possibly tiered, read what you want up to your tier, and the aggregator distributes the income.
  • jbverschoor 1y ago
    They're not if the infrastructure is there (and it is.. apple pay, google pay, paypal, even tokens... although that's a bit of a hurdle) The issues are: 1) There still are no *MICRO* transactions. I can't pay 10ct. 2) I don't want my (payment) information scattered all over the place. I simply want to pay a small amount, and I want the payment provider to protect my privace/data. I have paid for a subscription once just to read a single article. It took me two weeks of calling and other dark patterns to stop the subscription. I'll simply never do that again. period. Most articles/information is entertainment disguised as something useful anyway. The Spotify model only works for music somehow. If you mean a Netflix model, no thank you. I'm not going to support them into bullying the world into getting 5 subscriptions because the articles are scattered over services.
  • carlosjobim 1y ago
    > The alternative is aggregation - like Spotify for news, but without the cutthroat ethics. Pay a fixed amount, possibly tiered, read what you want up to your tier, and the aggregator distributes the income. And that is honestly a great alternative for news and written content. Syndication and paywalls. It's the future. How come death metal bands accept to be on the same platform as Japanese teen bands, but newspapers can't accept to be on the same platform as a rival who leans slightly more to the right or left than themselves?
  • 1y ago
• tristramb 1y ago
  Microtransactions for viewing news would just start a flood of AI generated sludge designed purely to harvest those microtransactions.
  • hedora 1y ago
    To watch this play out, get an Apple News+ subscription. (Unless it improved in the last few years.)
  • Workaccount2 1y ago
    I don't know if you have noticed that the internet has been a flood of slop content for years now just to harvest ad views. Rather than ad-blockers we could have "junk content provider" blockers.
• zelos 1y ago
  That's how Minitel used to work: each page you accessed would add a few pence to your bill.
• rgavuliak 1y ago
  You are wrong. There have been multiple attempts at micro-transactions - and they all failed. One of the biggest was Blendle - https://www.pugpig.com/2023/08/18/why-micropayment-champion-blendle-ditched-the-model-and-where-it-might-fit-in-subscription-strategies/ https://www.pugpig.com/2023/08/18/why-micropayment-champion-... Why? why do most B2B companies prefer subscription based pricing? Because it brings in predictability you can run a business on. Micro-transactions only work in utility context (electric, water, cloud compute). You can't run a news company on micro-transactions.
  • JohnFen 1y ago
    > Micro-transactions only work in utility context (electric, water, cloud compute). And nearly the entirety of retail sales. When I buy something at a store, I don't have to have an account, subscription, or anything of the sort. I can just grab the thing I want, fork over the price of that thing, and get on with my day. Aside from logistics, the problem with microtransactions for news that I can see is that it would encourage only the more sensationalistic news and discourage the more mundane news that is likely more important for people to know.
    • rgavuliak 1y ago
      > And nearly the entirety of retail sales Not really? Retail is mostly driven by normal transactions. > Aside from logistics, the problem with micro-transactions for news that I can see is that it would encourage only the more sensationalistic news and discourage the more mundane news that is likely more important for people to know. Exactly - it essentially kills journalism that requires a lot of upfront research or work.
    • selfhoster11 1y ago
      That's not a micro-transaction. It's a transaction, plain and simple.
  • lovelearning 1y ago
    Is predictability not essential for electric, water, or cloud? I didn't understand why news can't run on postpaid pay-per-use model, which I think you are implicitly referring. Note that pay-per-use isn't necessarily implying micro-transactions; we pay utility bills just once a month, and cloud is either postpaid pay-for-use or prepaid credits that are deducted based on usage.
• snowwrestler 1y ago
  Micro transactions are a classic example illustrating the differences between what people say they want to do, and what they actually do. They’ve been tried many different ways and never worked financially. There’s no conspiracy; most customers just didn’t want to use them.