10 ms·

Micropayments as a reality check for news sites

• jawns 9mo ago
  No, no, no! Micropayments are not the way. We already know the way. It's the cable/streaming model. You pay for a single monthly subscription and get access to substantially all of the major news content. What would need to happen for this to be possible? Cooperation between most of the major news outlets. Not cooperation in an anti-competitive sense, but willingness to participate in this sort of business model. I'm a former news editor and left the industry because the business side couldn't figure out a viable business model. I realize and feel deeply the loss we experience (especially at the local and state level) when quality journalism dies out, and I would love for the industry to recover. But they're not going to do it unless they recognize that single-site subscriptions (or micropayment transactions) aren't going to cut it.
  • eithel 9mo ago
    Apple news is around with that model. Not sure how successful they are though.
    • nikole9696 9mo ago
      Anecdata: I use Apple News+ for exactly this reason. I get many publications included, and some magazines, and over time it learns what stories I like and surfaces those more often.
  • rlue 9mo ago
    +1. I come online to discover new things because there's less friction online than anywhere else. What's more, digging through a mountain of content to find something that resonates with you is a form of work in its own right. Micropayments are friction, and if you put friction on top of the work of discovery, I will do something else with my time.
  • deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
  • stetrain 9mo ago
    Copying the cable model would favor big media companies over smaller, more local players. A music-streaming style option, where the user's monthly payment is distributed in proportion to the articles they read, might be better. (Although not without it's own issues)
    • cogman10 9mo ago
      I tend to agree, but the big problem is "who will operate this?". The music model worked because a heavyweight like apple was able to come in and negotiate with a huge number of labels while simultaneously allowing access to unlabeled content. That expanded with Spotify, though they got there by effectively stealing the music for as long as possible until they were established. I can't see how that'd work with news. Especially since so many of the news outlets exist and have been created to run propaganda for the owners. A decent number of them are effectively just funded by billionaires that want to push their agendas.
  • closewith 9mo ago
    Centralised billing effectively makes serious journalism impossible. Omnibus subscription services will ruthlessly cut anything that affects the bottom line, and effective journalism is necessarily unpopular.
    • carlosjobim 9mo ago
      Exactly! That's why Spotify doesn't allow any noisy music or music with curse words. The mainstream public would flee from the platform.
      • eli 9mo ago
        I'd encourage you to ask a recording artist how they like the arrangement they have with Spotify. But also, yeah, I do think the streaming financial incentives affect what music gets written and produced. Just not necessarily anything to do with cuss words.
        • carlosjobim 9mo ago
          The artists are there because of their own free will. They voluntarily signed their contracts with the record labels. How are journalists and independent journalism doing in comparison?
  • pier25 9mo ago
    What if you're not a major news outlet? Also, how's the deal between the distributor and the news outlets? Do you get paid according to views or is it a flat fee?
  • hinkley 9mo ago
    We also have PBS as a model.
    • jawns 9mo ago
      Until it gets defunded based on the whims of the administration :(
      • hinkley 9mo ago
        That doesn't change the fact that it worked for fifty five years.
    • MattGrommes 9mo ago
      The problem we have is that there are a ton of sites all asking for $5+. With PBS people can choose to give once at whatever they're comfortable with and aren't dealing with an ever increasing number of $5 charges. Some guy's Medium blog probably isn't worth $5 just like I wouldn't pay $5 for any random show on PBS. But donating to PBS once makes me feel like I'm supporting Frontline, Ken Burns, lots of people I like.
  • carlosjobim 9mo ago
    Oh, but don't you know? If our newspaper is on the same subscription as another newspaper which we don't like, then that means we agree with them in all their radical and dangerous opinions? No, no, no, people want to read only one newspaper, which tells them what to think and how to feel on every subject matter. That's why streaming services also failed. Imagine Beatles and gangster rap and heavy metal being on the same music platform? Fans would never accept that!
  • eli 9mo ago
    I think this is even harder to make work than straightforward micropayments with crypto or paypal or similar. Is it the same subscription fee no matter what publications I read or how many articles? (If it varies directly based on what I'm reading then I think it is just micropayments.) Publications with healthy subscription revenue like WSJ or the Economist are not going to be interested in participating unless they get paid a lot of money and/or can be assured it somehow will not cannibalize their direct sales. Who owns the customer relationship? Publishers have been burned pretty much 100% of the time they cede that direct relationship to someone else. Also, it's been tried: see Scroll, Apple News, Flattr, Coil, Brave BAT...
    • cyberax 9mo ago
      Scroll was successful. It provided more income than ads to participating companies. So it was hastily acquired and killed by Twitter. Flattr required installing an extension (sorry, no), Brave is a whole separate browser, Coil was based around cryptocrap.
      • eli 9mo ago
        I agree Scroll seemed very promising but I'm not sure how successful they were. Did they provide more income than ads from subscription fees? Meeting that goal while burning investors money is less impressive. Scroll also used a browser extension by the way.
        • cyberax 9mo ago
          They had basically no investor money. > Did they provide more income than ads from subscription fees? Yes. That's literally all they did. You paid for a subscription, and they distributed subscription fees among the sites that you visited. In return, you got an ad-free browsing experience. By the time they got killed, it was used on Ars Technica, TheDailyBeast, TheVerge and some other major news sites.
  • parpfish 9mo ago
    If you thought clickbait headlines were annoying when people were competing for ad impressions, just wait until they’re competing for micropayments.
  • fragmede 9mo ago
    Right. The problem is all the cooperation required. So then what's needed is an open platform that lets people put in their $10, and then sites can choose to implement it. It's a chicken and the egg problem. It hasn't worked in the past, but times change. Instead of looking at this like 3D televisions or VR, the counter example to think about is tablets — (note: human typed emdash) the Apple Newton was a flop, but the iPad is anything but. Or electric cars. The EV1 by GM was a flop and whatever you think about Elon Musk and Tesla, they do exist now. Video calling is another one. The 90's version just didn't work, but I use Facetime almost every day. The rails exist for micropayments with cryptocurrency, it's "just" going to take the right person and the right software to implement it for it to happen. The problem is money. LEDs that come in blue are foundational to our modern society. Without blue, we'd only have red and green. Unfortunately for him, the inventor of the blue LED, the man who poured his everything into making it, isn't ridiculously wealthy. For micropayments to happen, some one selfless and not seeking to make a profit on it, need to come along and make it a thing. So I don't know if it'll happen, because ghostty's funding model can't be replicated, but a man can dream.
• sanswork 9mo ago
  Micropayments work for games because there is some specific outcome I know I want and know paying this money will move me closer to that goal in the immediate future. That isn't the case for news content. In news it's "reading this might be interesting" or being generous "knowing this might improve my life at some point". That delay in outcome will kill micropayments because it again goes from a very easy calculation in your mind to "too hard" like Clay talked about.
  • post-it 9mo ago
    I think the site is right about the "coins" method. If I had an automatic subscription of $10/month to refill my news wallet, and I could pay $0.05 out of it to read an article, I'd do it, especially if it was a use-it-or-lose it system. In fact, if they charged $0.20 per story if you pay directly, or $0.05 per story if you pay out of your auto-reload wallet, I think that could incentivize users to subscribe. Of course, it would have to be shared across every newspaper, and publishers hate that. Apple News is the closest it's gotten - the app sucks, but you can share articles into it to remove the paywall and that works great.
    • sanswork 9mo ago
      People already can't be bothered clicking on the paywall busting links to view articles because the friction is too high. Having to decide if something is potentially worth 20 cents seems easy when you have to make that decision in your mind a single time for something you're obviously interested in but in reality it becomes multiple times a day for things that you are maybe only slightly curious about the fatigue will add up very quickly and I double anyone would do a second reload(if they do the first load at all).
      • bee_rider 9mo ago
        What’s a paywall busting link?
        • sanswork 9mo ago
• eli 9mo ago
  This does not seem to reckon with the many, MANY times this has been tried and failed. (The LinkedIn post at least acknowledges attempts that "did fail in the 90s and 2000s" and quickly waves them away.) There have been at least a dozen serious attempts in the last 20 years that I'm aware of. What about Blendle? They had NYT, WaPo and WSJ as launch partners in 2014 but give up on micropayments in 2023 citing "very low demand" Or Flattr. Or Invisibly. Or Pico. Or Brave's goofy crypto token. Or Coil. The Washington Post themselves experimented with cheap "day passes" a few years ago but I guess they didn't work well enough to keep. Arguably Medium's rev share program was another failed attempt. Heck no less a content middleman powerhouse than Apple tried and mostly failed to do a rev share / micropayments scheme with Apple News.
  • post-it 9mo ago
    The trick is market share. I'm not going to subscribe to a NYT/WaPo/WSJ trio because sometimes I want to read Reuters and I'm not going to pay for a partial solution. I was very happy with my Apple News subscription because it has every English-language newspaper I've come across.
    • eli 9mo ago
      I like Apple News too, though they are walking a bit of a tightrope with their publishing partners which is why you can't just click a link to wsj.com/blahblah and have it open in Apple News, and you can't really just browse a front page. (Also it notably does not have NYT.)
  • cyberax 9mo ago
    Scroll was successful. I had a subscription, and it worked on multiple sites that I was visiting. So Twitter acquired and killed it.
  • PaulHoule 9mo ago
    There was https://www.theverge.com/2024/4/19/24135011/twitter-alternative-post-news-shutdown https://www.theverge.com/2024/4/19/24135011/twitter-alternat... which had startup royalty behind it and a very slick web site that they didn't promote very well. (A friend of mine who is interested in this space didn't find out about it until it was announced it was shutting down.) I can only guess that the New York Times, WaPo and such were too good to talk to these people because they only managed to sign up third-tier news sources.
• mcteamster 9mo ago
  The difference between $0.00 and $0.01 is infinite. But I’m really curious how bad the free experience would have to become before people are open to paying a pittance?
  • parpfish 9mo ago
    The free experience on the site for every small town newspaper or tv station is horrific. Genuinely among the worst, least usable websites on the internet. The problem is that the horrendousness doesn’t drive people to pay, it drives them to social media. And a big part of this is that local papers consider their online presence secondary to print. So paying will get you a physical newspaper and unlimited access to the worst site in the world
  • gnatman 9mo ago
    OK but the difference between $0.00 and $0.01 is also 1 cent.
    • groestl 9mo ago
      And your data.
  • bee_rider 9mo ago
    Easier to just not be informed about local events.
• renewiltord 9mo ago
  You're going to put all the work into finding the news and doing the leg work. I'm going to make a site called NewsTheft.info that just says "YourNewsSite.com is reporting that <your content rewritten by an LLM>" and it's going to be free and people are going to use my thing. Then I'm going to shut it down when you all go bust. I am a rapacious eater of worlds. You can't stop me and the people love me because, since it's free, I can give them a better experience than you. Information wants to be free.
  • theendisney 9mo ago
    And with your added layer of review the product would be superior. I can think of many marketing formulas that would definitely work but since the game is not legwork but propaganda the industry should just die.
• glitchc 9mo ago
  No one reads print anymore. Most people nowadays consume their news either through a Youtube broadcast or a podcast. The news is produced for free and completely paid for through advertising. The folks using this site, we're in the (rather extreme) minority.
  • gertlex 9mo ago
    Do you think the category of people that "consume their news" via primarily reading headlines from aggregators (google/apple mobile built-in "news") is significant or no? (this is a big part of my consumption, and is combined with scrolling HN/reddit headlines; often to paywalled sites, which leads me to mostly reading comment discussions on those two sites) (edit: disclaimer after reading a few other comments: I use Android; so don't have personal experience with Apple News, which may in fact be significantly different/better product)
    • glitchc 9mo ago
      I'm looking at the next generation. Reading the news is unheard of for 30 and under. They prefer to listen to it or watch it.
      • gertlex 9mo ago
        Ahh, right, definite blind spot for me! (extra so since I'm hearing impaired)
• graybeardhacker 9mo ago
  I pay for the Ground News app. It's an aggregator that (somehow) gets me all the articles on a topic, shows me how factual each source is and which way they lean politically. It summarizes the articles so I can ignore the click-bate headline and know whether I want to read more. I'm honestly not sure why this isn't the standard. It solved all my news problems and fills all my news needs. I'm honestly not sure what these tiny news sites that have paywalls are thinking. The chances of me paying a monthly fee for news from a single source, let alone a tiny, local, single source, are less than zero.
  • freetime2 9mo ago
    Does it give you access to the full content? Or just link through to the article (which may be behind a paywall)? I would be willing to pay for content, but not for an aggregator.
  • tinfoilhatter 9mo ago
    > ... shows me how factual each source is and which way they lean politically. Fact-checkers and whatever you call people that gauge political biases aren't impartial sources of information. Someone pays their bills and those people typically have agendas besides delivering objective truth. I'm not suggesting that paying monthly fees or paywalls are a solution to the problem either. The real solution is to stop reading the news IMO. Let these companies go out of business and get replaced by something better. If one must read the news, just use an aggregator and archive.is for bypassing paywalls.
    • mmooss 9mo ago
      > Fact-checkers and whatever you call people that gauge political biases aren't impartial sources of information. Someone pays their bills and those people typically have agendas besides delivering objective truth. That's meaningless: It's like saying everyone is a liar or everyone is violent, or a potential murderer or everyone's partner is an adulterer. Yes, anyone can, everyone lies, nobody is perfect - but some people are 'honest' and some are 'liars' and there is all the difference in the world.
• AndrewStephens 9mo ago
  I get the sentiment but micropayments just don’t work - the main problems are not technical but social. Even in the gaming sector, nobody really charges less than about a dollar for items - that is the smallest unit of money where putting up with fraud, complaints, and chargebacks becomes worthwhile. Add to this the huge race to the bottom (they are charging 3 cents for their article, read my summary for 2 cents) and you quickly begin to see why micropayments have never taken off. Finally, I wrote a blog post along these lines with more detail[0]. For those who disagree, ask yourselves; would you pay me 2 cents before you click that link. [0] https://sheep.horse/2024/11/on_micropayments.html https://sheep.horse/2024/11/on_micropayments.html
  • beeflet 9mo ago
    The problems you describe are technical problems. How do you increase efficiency and avoid charge-backs due to fraud? Perhaps it is enabled by cryptocurrency (some systems like payment channels, RaiBlocks already exist for this). I would go into more detail about this but I think i've already debated you about this already. The entire field of cryptography is about developing technical solutions to previously intractable social problems. As I have described earlier, the race to the bottom is a feature, not a bug. It encourages other sites to mirror your content. I would pay you 0.002 cents before clicking on that link. I already have to expend time and energy reading it, and I already pay for an internet connection to read it. If you put some sort of PoW firewall to deter AI scraping like many sites have been doing, I already have to expend money in the form of electricity to access the site.
    • Gigachad 9mo ago
      That just moves the fraud to the other direction by making it hard for legitimate chargebacks. Say someone steals your card info, then uses it to buy some news crypto.
      • beeflet 9mo ago
        Firstly, that appears to be a negative externality. It seems to affect people who use the conventional credit card system as opposed to the new cryptocurrency/micropayments system I propose. So it has the effect of strengthening the cryptocurrency/micropayments system against competition. For example, I would say that the credit card system is essentially subsidized through other forms of payment via transaction fees/cashback (I can go into detail why I think this is the case, if you would like). This is a mechanism that benefits the credit card companies at the users of other payment mechanisms (cash, crypto, etc.). So this mechanism of the credit card payment system has the effect of strengthening it against competition. Secondly, I am not even sure if it's a negative externality. It depends on how fraud is handled in the conventional banking system and who takes the blame. Let's say that the charge-back goes all the way to the exchange, so now the exchange that facilitated the transaction is down both X cryptocurrency and Y dollars. In order to be profitable, the exchange needs to charge more in fees and needs to spend more in surveillance to counteract fraud. So ultimately the users of the exchange would pay for fraud. Lastly, it is important to differentiate the two sources of fraud. There is the fraud inside of the micropayments system, where I pay 0.01 cents to view a webpage and I don't receive what I want. That's a very low-risk fraud, and by gaining a fraction of a cent, they can lose like 100x that in potential business through micropayments. Then there is the fraud that happens at the border of "hard" money (cash/precious metals/crypto) and "soft" chargeback-able money in the conventional credit card system. This is pretty much facilitated just by these hard forms of money existing and being exchangeable with soft money. I would argue the weakness lies in the insecurity of the soft money systems (specifically the outdated systems of authentication). But you could still apply some sort of limit to the amount of money a single bank account can exchange for crypto (say, $20 a day) without hurting the micropayments system, because the payments involved are so small. So the risk of fraud at the exchange could be much lower for this specific use-case of cryptocurrency.
• claytongulick 9mo ago
  > who want to bury us in deepfakes, extreme right wing bullshit It's a shame with articles like this that are otherwise insightful, they just lose me with sentences like that. Like, if you don't have enough insight to recognize that bullshit is a general political issue, and has been forever, how can I rely on any other analysis you make?
  • ummonk 9mo ago
    Which tech billionaires are trying to bury us in extreme left wing bullshit?
    • claytongulick 9mo ago
      [flagged]
      • ummonk 9mo ago
        The statement you quoted was about Big Tech oligarchs, not media bias. You need to work on your reading comprehension.
        • claytongulick 9mo ago
          Did it make you feel uncomfortable to have your bias pointed out to you? Is that why you made the inflammatory statement "you need to work on your reading comprehension?" Granted, I probably wouldn't have felt great if someone had said "bullshit" had worked on me. Especially if it was true.
• Animats 9mo ago
  I want a lie bounty. If I pay for an article and find a lie in it, I should get a refund plus a bug bounty. That would make fact-checking pay off. A real problem is that most of the fact-oriented sources are paywalled, while the polemic sites, especially on the hard right, are free. Fox News and X are free, but the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal are paywalled.
• CrzyLngPwd 9mo ago
  I wouldn't pay for a news site, and I try to avoid looking at them, but sometimes I get sucked in. The news is toxic propaganda, and nothing more. Nothing actionable. Avoid at all costs.
• fmajid 9mo ago
  I have a patent on micropayments for the Web from 1996. 30 years later, the situation hasn't changed and Clay Shirky or Andrew Odlyzko's arguments around the mental cost of microtransactions remain valid. Besides subscriptions to individual publications, the only model that would work is a Spotify-like subscription for a bundle of sites, with the revenue shared according to page views (or better, some metric that does not reward clickbait). If they don't want to be stiffed on royalties like how musicians get pennies from Spotify, news sites will need to establish some sort of co-op to host this, and not rely on the likes of Meta or Apple, as tech companies have proven treacherous to the news biz many, many times before.
  • boplicity 9mo ago
    News companies already have syndication, and revenue sharing based on it. A subscription to a newspaper often includes many articles written by other newspapers, distributed via syndication agreements.
  • mmooss 9mo ago
    > Clay Shirky or Andrew Odlyzko's arguments around the mental cost of microtransactions remain valid What about iTunes, and money transfer apps like Venmo and Zelle, which people use widely for microtransactions (and more)?
    • fmajid 9mo ago
      Microtransactions are like paying $0.10 for an article.
  • beeflet 9mo ago
    what's the patent?
    • fmajid 9mo ago
      https://blog.majid.info/pdf/patent_ppv.pdf https://blog.majid.info/pdf/patent_ppv.pdf (in French, however) It's a micropayment proxy using network authentication, billing on your ISP bill, with a reload grace period to prevent double-billing. It was deployed by France Telecom in its Wanadoo retail Internet service, but most of the money they made was from selling ringtones, not the original purpose of migrating Minitel service providers to the Web.
• micromacrofoot 9mo ago
  who the hell wants to think about micropayments every time they read an article? microtransactions just suck outright, they create a ton of overhead for everyone involved — both use and implementation not to mention that they're fundamentally incompatible with the american credit card cabal, which forces you into buying some goofy monopoly money that you're likely to overspend on regularly
  • linsomniac 9mo ago
    I'd rather think about micropayments than think about subscriptions.
    • micromacrofoot 9mo ago
      micropayments are just subscriptions with extra steps in the US there's no easy way to implement them without essentially buying a bulk of nonsense tokens, because the american banking system is complete garbage and still doesn't have a good peer-to-peer payment system without credit card processing fees that make microtransactions too expensive
• subpixel 9mo ago
  I pay for subscriptions, several, but I am never going to pay one publication a small fee every time I read an article. That model is completely counter-intuitive and punitive to the consumer. What I _would _do is pay a flat fee to subscribe to several publications. That's the only path: to give people more value than they expect for less money than they expect. It could be multi-tiered: the more publications you subscribe to, the less each costs. So like there's the $19 plan, the $29 plan, and so on. Some tiers are even ad-free. You'd also need to nurture all of these subscribers with a sense of community, public radio style. This is more likely to emerge in the newsletter space than in the traditional new space. Innovator's dilemma.
  • makestuff 9mo ago
    Isn't this the main complaint people had about cable packages though? People were tired of paying $100/mo and only watching 10 channels out of 150. I came across a startup awhile ago that was handling the micropayments for you and you paid a monthly subscription fee which is similar to what you want. I think the main issue is getting every publisher to agree to onboard to your platform before you have sufficient scale of paying customers.
    • bscphil 9mo ago
      This is totally hypothetical, but I wonder if a system whereby your dollars went to the publications you actually read, but you could immediately, at any time read anything else you wanted for free would work. There would be an obvious reason to subscribe (you get past the paywall for any publication that is part of the bundle) but you would have the feeling that you're not "wasting" money because your money only goes to the publications you actually support. (In reality, of course, cable providers were mostly doing this under the hood along with pocketing a big cut for themselves; television is just expensive to produce. But it didn't help the feeling of unfairness when you didn't watch any sports but ESPN was probably the most expensive channel in your "package".)
      • AlotOfReading 9mo ago
        Isn't that the YouTube premium model? You pay a fixed monthly fee, Google takes a cut and the rest is divided among the channels you watch. It's supposedly in proportion to the watch time you've allocated to each of them, but I'm not sure that's ever been confirmed.
• spir 9mo ago
  If micropayments have a future, it's on blockchains. https://www.x402.org/ https://www.x402.org/ https://www.8004scan.io/networks https://www.8004scan.io/networks https://www.x402scan.com/ https://www.x402scan.com/
  • Bratmon 9mo ago
    Why? What does adding a slow database to the process help?
    • CobrastanJorji 9mo ago
      The argument I had originally heard was "the transaction costs of credit cards is so high, we need a system that works for many tiny payments. But of course, most of the cryptocurrency transaction fees are still pretty high, and a dedicated "tiny transaction" company would presumably be able to offer the same service for less cost than a distributed equivalent.
      • littlecranky67 9mo ago
        Transaction fees for bitcoin sent via the lightning network (which is a layer 2 solution) are in the "less than a cent" category and are settled in a few seconds. This is not fiction, this is i.e. how Trump made his for-the-cameras bitcoin payment during his campaign.
        • sanswork 9mo ago
          Lightning isn't even a good solution for most diehard bitcoin users. It's a failed project. It would take 27 years to onboard every internet user to the lightning network unless you start adding level 3 aggregators and then at that point you lose all the benefit of it being on chain at all. It would take almost 2 years just to onboard every American assuming during that time there were zero other bitcoin transactions. Then you need to add the fees for the on and off ramps to the individual transaction fees to get the real cost per transaction noting that these would go up quite a bit as the competition between lightning and non-lightning uses of the transaction space would drive prices higher.
• __MatrixMan__ 9mo ago
  > We know that micropayments can work because mobile games are a thing. Paying $1.00 for an in app purchase that you thought about and decided on is not a micropayment, that's just a small payment. What makes micropayments interesting is that they can be small enough to escape notice, except in aggregate. They happen in the background, tightly coupled to the thing they're for, and not as part of an explicit purchase that added friction to the consumer's day. I think there's probably a lot of potential to simplify things with micropayments. Like perhaps rather than paying my mobile provider to maintain a web of relationships with regional network operators and distribute money to them on cadence which has nothing to do with my usage of their network, I could instead just attach some money to each packet and transmit it to the lowest bidder in range (payment stays in escrow until packet delivered, then pays all operators involved). It could be that by cutting out the middleman I pay less and the network operators get more. That's not what this is about though.
  • beeflet 9mo ago
    There should be a new word for the not-exactly-micro-micropayments that the author describes. I suggest "minipayments". As you, I associate the micropayment idea with truly tiny individual payments. Like paying for bandwidth by megabyte, where each payment is much less than a cent. The risk of fraud due to any individual payment not being fulfilled is low. At most you loose 0.01c of money, and the vendor loses $ of potential business.
    • Izkata 9mo ago
      The $1 in-game content payments are already so well known (and for such a long time) as "micropayments" I had thought that was where the term originated.
      • Macha 9mo ago
        Isn’t it microtransactions? Which kind of hints at the difference, since it’s all the ceremony of a two party transaction, while micropayments proposals usually have some focus on being automatic or frictionless
• dynm 9mo ago
  There is a lot of hate for the idea of micropayments here, so I'd like to offer a counterpoint. I use a service that provides access to a bunch of different LLMs. Each time I call an LLM I, in effect, pay a $0.001 - $0.05 for the response. (Technically, this is implemented as me having to renew earlier.) Each time I make a call, I don't know if the answer will be useful. I don't even know how much it will cost! And in practice, the answers are often garbage, and I have to pay anyway. I find this annoying, but--to my surprise--only very mildly annoying. This has made me much more open-minded about micropayments for news / articles.
  • salawat 9mo ago
    There isn't so much hate, as it's fundamentally DoA based on the financial system architecture of the United States, which creates strict liability, and a licensing requirement for digital money transmission. You do not get to opt out of that responsibility. Micropayments are therefore a pipedream that undermines all progress at making any type of AML or KYC possible, which then in turn makes fighting any type of financial crime nigh-impossible. The entire thing is held together through third party legal fictions that do the law enforcement as a pre-req of doing business. The government, and by extension the populace, would have to accept the intractibility of chasing down criminal financial networks were any sort of micropayment framework ever able to exist outside the regulatory regime. It's a perennial dream of the up and coming technologist, who has not been exposed to enough humanity to understand we can't have nice things. Sorry to be yet another buster of bubbles. I was you-adjacent once. Then I actually worked at a money transmitting firm. Boy, did that come with some reality checks.
    • sanex 9mo ago
      If only there was some sort of alternate monetary system based on cryptography that enabled instant micro payments.
      • salawat 9mo ago
        Using a public ledger, that is just surveilled and treated as prosecution futures, or targeting for kidnappers. Yes, we know. It's also got major usability issues, and tends to end up in practice defaulting to a centralized custodial model anyways for the vast majority of users. Where it can't, the onramps to convert to the currency of the land are outlawed.
• ggm 9mo ago
  It's a bit dispiriting to be discussing a 30+ year old idea which in turn is built on a 60 year old idea by Ted Nelson.
  • mikestorrent 9mo ago
    Well, the problem is that it's still just a little bit too hard to implement. In-person, it was always easy to just have a coffee can labelled "Tips"... back when we had jingly pocket money to throw around, at least. We've lost that with the move to digital currency, and nothing has quite brought back the anonymous ease of just tossing a loonie in a jar for someone, whether it's the barista, a busker, or a homeless person. On the web, he mentions that a micropayment platform that solves the Sign In problem would be useful... well, Sign In with Ethereum / Metamask exists, but it's still too much to ask for people to use it. One wedge issue coming down the pike that may force this is mandatory age verification, since most websites will need to outsource that. I for one would prefer something entirely anonymous and cash-like. I don't need my preferences to be on file with god-knows-which data vendors to form profiles on me just because I liked a stupid article one time enough to give the author a dollar.
  • mmooss 9mo ago
    Much very successful tech is the progeny of failed old ideas - maybe most of it. Look at AI, as a glaring example. Look at video calls. ...
• ummonk 9mo ago
  In my ideal world I’d subscribe to a service with a monthly subscription fee where the service takes a small cut and then converts the remainder into a use-it-or-lose-it tip balance (perhaps with the unused balance being auto-donated to a selected journalism nonprofit). In exchange for this subscription, news providers, bloggers, etc. would unpaywall their articles to me, knowing that by doing so they’re vying for a shot at getting tipped by me for their article.
  • DaiPlusPlus 9mo ago
    Isn’t that “Basic Attention Token”?
    • ummonk 9mo ago
      Not at all. The whole point is that I want discretion over which articles get rewarded for providing me value, not simply monetizing my attention.
• w10-1 9mo ago
  The title bar of the browser should report how much you've spent in the time frame you select, and the cost of a given article in both absolute and percentage terms. Along with silly privacy/cookie flags Then one click you can approve both, or set a policy to auto-approve any site with minimal cookies and less than 0.01%/mo of your budget. Then ideally when you're done you click red/yellow/green buttons to close the site, indicating whether you were happy with the result. (And set your policy to avoid sites you dissed.) Then also when you hover over a link you get a pop-up with the same rate and quality info, as text or icons. It's easy and provable at small to large scales. It just takes coordination. As motivation, this could enable site-side price discrimination, to maximize revenue. That could drive privacy features...
• boplicity 9mo ago
  You know who isn't arguing for micropayments for news articles? Pretty much every damn publisher. Nobody who wants to build a stable business would want to depend on micropayments. Such a system would be a race to the bottom, just like garnering "Facebook likes" and similar "virality" is a failing proposition. (And look at what happened to companies like Buzzfeed, who were focused on just this.) We have a huge problem in our society, of people not valuing journalism, and not wanting to pay for it. Here on HN you regularly see people attempt to actively subvert copyright (by linking to "archive sites"), in addition to the constant drip of criticism when publishers do things to try to build their business, such as collect email addresses, use paywalls, etc. Publishers need reliable, stable, income, not the lottery type system that would come from micropayments. They need to be paid to do journalism, not write articles that convince people to spend "coins" on them. Fortunately, publishers are actually figuring out how to build stable businesses. There's still a lot of work to do, especially in terms of local journalism, but it's clear that there is no future for micropayments, based on what seems to actually work. And please, I beg you, set aside a budget to support journalists, and spend it.
• Ericson2314 9mo ago
  There's two possible futures - give up capitalism for information, and rely on UBI and gov grants for art and media - make the market great again with micropayments and subscriptions Both of these have problems, but also both are better than ads, which have been an unmitigated disaster.
• deadbabe 9mo ago
  If bots could be forced to pay per crawl somehow, it would subsidize nearly all legit user traffic.
• aroheir 9mo ago
  [dead]
• cranberryturkey 9mo ago
  [flagged]
• tootie 9mo ago
  Advertising in an SEO game. Get ranked in Google and take a few pennies from millions of drive-by users. Subscriptions is a loyalty game. Convince users of your value and get them to commit to becoming a supporter for an extended period. Get them to install an app, accept breaking news alerts and lean on you as a trusted source. Micropayments is neither. There's no obvious path to generate consistent micropayment revenue. Maybe for like long-form features, but not for daily newsrooms.
  • AuthAuth 9mo ago
    Put out good content that people want to read and people will read it and pay you for it. Youtubers do fine with inconsistent revenue for each video. There is usually less risk writing an article than producing a video.
    • tootie 9mo ago
      They do a version of the SEO/ads game. They also are mostly just people talking. Journalism requires orders of magnitude more effort and resources.
• ErikCorry 9mo ago
  I like the coins idea. I don't subscribe because I know I'll forget about it and it will turn into a recurring charge on my credit card. But I would buy $10 of coins, knowing the paywall just comes back if I don't buy more, and if I lose interest it won't keep costing me anything. When I see the "$1 introductory offer" I just think they are trying to trick me.
• yunohn 9mo ago
  If one thinks about this problem deeply, and the current solution of showing ads, you may realize that micro transactions are already “implemented”. Ads are paid for by the advertiser as mille-impressions (or conversion, etc), which works way better than demanding money at that level - and they get it no matter what. This implicit payment works way better than making consumers think about it and start the debate of value and trust and so on that everyone are debating here.
• m132 9mo ago
  I used to find this and the whole idea of "Web3" ridiculous, but with the recent saturation of low-quality slop and disinformation, perhaps it's time to reconsider. I enjoy reading thorough publications written by actual humans who have something to say. Part of why I'm here. And I'd take micropayments over subscriptions anytime. There's just one catch nobody seems to be eager to talk about. While I'm willing to pay that 1¢, if it's 1¢ + any identifying information, I'm out.
• kkfx 9mo ago
  The Nostr model spread, actually, while most still ignore even it's existence...
• bitwarrior 9mo ago
  Micropayments is something that I think the internet as a whole needs. However, I don't think the mental model people usually have isn't quite "micro" and frictionless enough. Imagine a world where your web browser essentially contains and controls your wallet. You pre-pay into that wallet, say, $20. I imagine we'll probably also refer to that as "credits" so internationalization isn't so tough. So let's pretend we have 2000 credits. Now, let's start browsing the internet. You start by conducting a web search. Perhaps there is a mechanism in HTML and the browser that basically say, "Clicking this will cost 1c". We'd probably develop a shorthand, some icon and beside it, it says the price in credits. Imagine a button like [(1c) Search]. Immediately, what is the benefit? The search engine works for you. It's like Kagi in that regard, but you didn't need to set up an account and give them your credit card information. YOU are the customer. There are no ads, they need to compete to make the search results the best, otherwise you're going somewhere else. You're no longer the product. You see a news article in your search result. Fantastic. You visit the news website - there isn't an ad in sight. Pure news. The article starts with a title, a few lines, perhaps the first paragraph, and to read more, you click that [2c Read the Article] button. You click it, and boom, you see the entire article. No subscriptions, no popups, no ads. You are the customer. The news site wants you to be happy, not advertisers. You. The news article discusses a new open source project that is really taking off. Cool! You click the link. Looks pretty neat! You download it, toy with it, and find that it's actually pretty useful! You go back to their repo site, and there's a little tip option. Easy peasy. You tip them 100 credits. No signing up for an account at some other site, no entering your credit card, just done and done. I like the idea of micropayments because it makes the user the customer again. The internet has become incredibly hostile to users since we are, by and large, the product rather than the customer. We need to flip the incentive model. Does it suck to pay for things on the internet? A little. But I'd rather that and get a great experience (and also allow news organizations to have a working business model, etc) than what we have now.
  • matheusmoreira 9mo ago
    Taxes and AML/KYC kill this. People need to surveil their customers in order to comply with legal requirements. As soon as money is involved there's so much bureaucracy people just contract it out to intermediaries like Stripe and by then payments are anything but micro.
• wanderingmind 9mo ago
  Micropayments gives me flexibility that subscription doesn't. I'm happy to pay $5 a month just to read Matt Levin. I'm not paying $40 for Bloomberg subscription. It also gives publishers signal on what really users care about and more importantly what are they willing to pay for. Maybe, there is a truly crypto market here for micropayments without the overhead of operators like Stripe
• pessimizer 9mo ago
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• eek2121 9mo ago
  the hard part is the noise: Very few sites offer quality, original, important content. Nobody wants to pay for a site the repeats the same old stuff that every other site does, especially when those other sites don't have a paywall. This drives the cost of content to zero, which leads companies to rely on ads, and ad blockers to block those ads.
• danbruc 9mo ago
  I pay $19 per month to some company X, and company X distributes this money to all participating websites I visit during that month, in return I get ad-free access to all the content. And this is implemented in a way that no website learns who I am and company X does not learn which websites I visited.
  • fruitworks 9mo ago
    Or you could cut out the middleman and use a micropayment system like GNU Taler to pay the websites directly. That way you dont have to hope and pray that the middleman doesn't decide to track you censor, and charge increasing fees, which current middlemen like patreon currently do.
    • danbruc 9mo ago
      GNU Taler also has a middleman, the exchange. And they play more or less exactly the same role as my company X is supposed to do, exchange money for tokens that are handed to websites when you visit them and which they can then redeem. And I would want to avoid true micro transactions, i.e. pay amount x for looking at one article, because then the amount you spent will depend on how many pages you visited in a given month and that might make you think about each click and in turn hinder adoption. I want to pool the money of all users, divide it by the total number of payed links visited in the last month, and then pay that much per click to each participating website.
• danpalmer 9mo ago
  > We know that micropayments can work because mobile games are a thing. We know that micropayments can work because slot machines are a thing, but I don't think most people would say that's what entertainment should be. Similarly, journalism can do better. Are people going to pay $0.20 to read "One thing financial advisors won't tell you, you'll retire 10 years earlier!", or are you going to pay $0.20 for "‘It feels like a worse version of Lotto’: what Australians told us about the great intergenerational wealth transfer" (a Guardian special report from today). I know I'd rather pay to read the latter, but between clickbait and optimising revenue, the former is going to perform a lot better. Not to mention that the cost to produce slop content will be near zero, so they can charge less, where the cost to produce high quality content will be far higher and will therefore not be able to compete on price. I'd much rather commit to paying $10 a month for news and then choose which articles get a share of that after reading. If I've already committed it costs me nothing to pay for an article, but by doing it after reading I can much more easily support good journalism. The problem with that is that it will probably trend towards just the news subs we have today.
• RadiusTech 9mo ago
  IMO the thread is asking the wrong question ("can micropayments work?") They can, but we need to start with first principals on what's technically necessary to move value, and what can we toss out (from both traditional/card systems and crypto). You need a linearly scalable state machine and a means of orchestrating the changes in that state between actors. Everything else (kyc, fraud protections, etc.) is secondary. Machines are likely going to be paying extreme small amounts between each other, so its highly questionable whether that state machine (a) needs to protect for fraud at .001 cents per tx and (b) whether a machine, acting on its own accord, spending .001 was contemplated during the construction of the bank secrecy act (which had the de minimis oversight of transactions at ~82k USD in 2026 values). Ensure no double spend, ensure that the machines can move value as needed, change the state. Ensure that the system scales as much as the volumes of transactions needed. And charge effectively free rates (we're at 10m tx/usd). Lots more to build here, but we're not far off. (and we're launching soon at radiustech.xyz). Come check us out.
  • fruitworks 9mo ago
    have you heard the good news about our lord and savior chaumian cash?
    • deleted 9mo ago
      [deleted]
    • madars 9mo ago
      eCash is an answer to "can you move value privately?" (yes, with concessions). Radius is solving "can you execute a million conditional state transitions per second at sub-penny costs?" Blind signatures are still just value transfers and offer no expressivity. If your agent wants DvP with conditional logic, or trustless escrow that releases on programmatic conditions, Chaumian eCash doesn't help. LN gets you close to some forms of atomic exchange, but close-to-atomic isn't atomic, and neither gives you composability. You can move balances, but you can't orchestrate multi-step workflows that can't unwind in the middle.
      • 9mo ago
• munificent 9mo ago
  Let's say a journalist writes an excellent article about something political of serious import. I'm fine with paying for that article to get access to it. But, really, the article is a lot more useful to me if other people can access it too. Since everyone can vote, I want the whole populace to be informed, even poor people. I wonder if there is a viable business model where for each article, readers can pay to unlock it not just for themselves, but for everyone. The price would obviously have to be higher since you aren't just buying it for yourself. But perhaps the sense of "I'm helping build a better-informed world and helping broadcast my values" would encourage people to pay that higher price. Maybe you could do something cumulative and Kickstarter-like where there's a threshold for the article to be unlocked and anyone can chip in to getting it over the line. This would take advantage of human psychology that we like being part of something bigger than ourselves. And it would hopefully have the emergent property that news that people feel is actually valuable gets spread more widely than useless junk. You could even list the names of the sponsors of the article when it gets unlocked (if they didn't want to be anonymous). How cool would be to one of the people who helped an important story "break"?
  • juris 9mo ago
    that is an incredible idea and i would support you with code should you or anyone else decide to make that happen
  • DennisP 9mo ago
    That seems like a really great idea.
  • ted_bunny 9mo ago
    What about crowdfunding bounties for information to be publicly released? We all have some big questions and I'd gladly pay into them if it worked.
  • shimman 9mo ago
    Sorry to be the wet blanket but what you're arguing for, advocacy, is by far the worst and most ineffective form of doing politics. Talking about things doesn't convince anyone. Talking to the small amounts of people that agree doesn't get the balling moving. Want to know what does? Organizing. Getting people that disagree with you, to agree with you. That never happens through advocacy, you have to organize.
• nitroedge 9mo ago
  Often times on fal.ai I'm trying a new text to image model and I just get an error. I try again, fail, try again and it works. Sad seeing it take $0.05 and give me an error but most of the time I pull the one-armed bandit again.
• artzev_ 9mo ago
  [dead]
• dankwizard 9mo ago
  I would leave something about the article but I can't get over the horrendous layout of this website. Why is the article using only 20-30% of the horizontal space? Why is the left pane similar posts wrapping after 2 or 3 words? Shocking. I'd pay $1.00 to load this article and have it look decent.
• fdefitte 9mo ago
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  • r-w 9mo ago
    > Per-article pricing would expose that 90% of online journalism is commodity rewrites of AP wire stories. And recommendations for products they've never tried, with affiliate links.
  • jdprgm 9mo ago
    - The 10% that's genuinely original would thrive, and everything else would die overnight. And you are saying that's a bad thing?
    • fdefitte 9mo ago
      Good point
• 1970-01-01 9mo ago
  Absolutely nothing has changed since the 90s. News should be free. Free with unobtrusive ads if you want pictures and video to help with hosting costs. Stop trying to fiddle with this formula. lite.cnn.com is all we will ever need in terms of getting the message. Mircopayments are not a solution because nothing needs to be fixed.
  • jeromechoo 9mo ago
    One unobtrusive ad in the middle of an article isn't going to pay for a journalist and their camera person in a war zone. By "news should be free" I think you probably mean "taxpayer funded".
    • 1970-01-01 9mo ago
      Good journalists don't aspire to become wealthy. I meant what I wrote. The cost to fetch the article off a server and display it on my screen is too cheap to measure. A few ads will cover it.
• alphazard 9mo ago
  People already pay for journalism through substack. It's not micropayments, it's a commitment to the ongoing consumption of a high quality creator's work. I can't think of a single news outlet that isn't obviously propaganda or virtue porn. People who want that can have it, but the internet has has made the business models common knowledge, and now most people would be embarrassed to consume these outlets. All of that was true before prediction markets, now if a fact is important enough, it has a market, and if I need to know the best take on that fact, I will look at the market.
• LarsAlereon 9mo ago
  The YouTube Premium model seems to be the way forward here. In short, pay $5 per month and every video you watch gets paid slightly more per view than they would if you watched ads. Expanding this to a larger ecosystem may require a larger fee, but avoiding the friction of people deciding whether the marginal cost to read an article is worth it is an obvious win.
  • notatoad 9mo ago
    i believe in the world of long-form text content, this is the medium.com model. the've been working at this for a while, i think even before youtube premium existed. they're still kicking, but it hasn't exactly been a roaring success.
• luqtas 9mo ago
  seriously, this bullshit and ISP raising prices of what's basically UBER cheap: transporting data to others via internet information should be free and not locked under paywalls; in no time if this pill is swallowed you will have the same level of shallow articles but this time, all paid
• motoxpro 9mo ago
  The reality is that articles are worth something like .000000001 cents per read, not 1 or 2 cents. See music streaming.
• camillomiller 9mo ago
  As a disgruntled journo who’s doing mostly very different things to live, I believe the fundamental issue is that we keep treating journalism as a business. It is not sustainable as such anymore for a long time, and keeping it structured as a business creates all sorts of wrong incentives. Good journalism today comes mostly from no profits, and that is the only model that makes sense in my view. Make it so that foundations and governments can legally fund newspapers from a non political organ and have a charity-style funding process. That’s true for newspapers but not really for tv, so this is not a panacea. In general I find it fascinating how we try to analyze all sorts of business cases for newspapers except this one (aka they’re not a business anymore).
• armchairhacker 9mo ago
  I imagine micropayments for small sites to avoid DoS (e.g. from dumb AI scrapers) and maybe get decent profit if they become very popular, but mainly pay to keep the server running. They would be so small that someone who spends their entire day visiting different websites would pay less than their phone bill; and centralized scrapers with a decent amount of funding would still work. Real funding would come in ways that don't depend on visitor count: patronage, government/industry grants, people running the sites having side jobs, UBI. Because: - I'd rather avoid intellectual property and allow AI summaries, remixes, etc. without penalty to the main site - Visitor count tends to benefit mainstream sites. Patronage and grants can support niche sites who expect few users that are willing to pay more, without gating mainstream visitors (via higher visitor micropayments) in case they become popular - Visitor count benefits sites that have already been built. Patronage and grants support sites that look promising, but haven't been built and may fail. The latter include indie and experimental sites; the former only include sites that are easy to build, and sites whose success is predictable from people that already have money - I'm skeptical that revenue from visitor count (even from ads or subscriptions) will remain sustainable long-term The above doesn't only apply to traditional sites, but any digital product including ones people currently pay for, like books, movies, and video games. These creators need to make a living, but since their product is not physical, there is no need to tie revenue to copies sold, and I suspect tying revenue to patronage and grants would lead to better products.
• vivzkestrel 9mo ago
  - stupid question: why dont news websites do affiliate partnerships with every software as a service guy out there? - Surely they can get 30% for each sale right? - Millions of people visit them and vast majority are not interested in buying a subscription just to read one post
• raincole 9mo ago
  > We know that micropayments can work because mobile games are a thing Do we? If anything, we know micropayments won't result in quality journalism because mobile games are a thing. > but mobile game developers have figured out how to get people to spend money on in-app-purchases (IAP), by turning it into a two-step process. Nah. I mean yes this is one of the psychological tricks that makes players pay on mobile, but it's not that big a deal. The real deal of mobile games: - Difficult curve design: you know how slot machines show you two matching symbols and one off, instead of three random ones? It has to make the player feel like they can reasonably beat the level, but just "a little bit unlucky..." - PvP element: Basically pay to win, but presented more like 'grind to win.' Free players can theoratically beat who paid if they grind for needed resources for thousands of hours. So they can tell themselves that they're just 'saving time' when they eventually pay. - Soft porn: A lot of mobile games from Chinese/Japanes/Korean publishers are just soft porn by western standards. Are these what we want to replicate on news sites? I think this article sugarcoats the dark patterns in mobile games to convince the author themselves that micropayment won't lead to a race to the bottom.
• triage8004 9mo ago
  There's a good reason why almost all the media is owned by a few conglomerates
• BiteCode_dev 9mo ago
  What we need is a netflix/spotify model, but for the news. I never pay for the news, because it's mostly disappointing. But I would pay 20 euros a month if I could have access to all the news, and just let me filter little by little what I think suits me.
• L-four 9mo ago
  The payment in mobile games are a one button click. Browsers will never support this, as they're all funned by advertising.
• alfredz0x 9mo ago
  Relevant data point: built httpay.xyz which applies this model beyond news to any API. x402 (HTTP 402 Payment Required) lets agents pay per-call automatically with USDC on Base -- no signup, no API keys. Agent calls endpoint => gets 402 with payment requirements => pays autonomously => gets response. 121 endpoints so far ($0.001-$0.005 each). First real paying users came in this week. The agents paid, got the data, moved on. Exactly as intended. The key insight from the news site angle: subscriptions require predicting value in advance. Per-call payments flip that -- you only pay for what you actually use. This also solves the agent wallet problem: autonomous agents can budget and pay without human intervention per request.
• nacozarina 9mo ago
  this utopian ‘legit’ news site does not actually exist anywhere they are all propaganda factories with different grades of editorial gloss ft.com and crazyshit.com are equally unserious, but only one is transparent about it
• julcol 9mo ago
  >> And—like any other payments directly from readers—micropayments would be a multiplier for advertising, not an alternative. WTF, no way >> no drug like attention ... help develop the habit.... Mark Z. again ?? legit advertisers ?¿? Are there any ?? taboola and their ilk unremovable apps ? anybody wants their heads blow up? >>The survival of legit sites depends on how quickly marketers can level up to stuff Bonkers. Legit sites depend on reaching financial independence on legit valuable content that people want to read. It is true that I look to this from an EU perspective. I am biased Time ago a colleague and I pitched YC for compsate.com, basically a wallet (real money, forget crypto) based system ( no subscriptions ) for news/content micropayments system. The idea was based on no adds, no tracking, read news like you buy a newspaper at the kiosk. Pay 2 orders of magnitude more for each article you read (than what ads provide per page), your choice. Replenish wallet at will. Logging into a system (acquiring an ID token in the process), then browse freely to any news site and read any content, including pay-walled which would be paid out of your wallet. All near real time. Small amounts would drive down risk of fraud, that could be as well controlled by the selection of news stand that can join. Pay for what you read, compensate for the value of what you read, make your news source independent (at least financially). We fail the pitch but I believe it still is doable and preferable for the media if they would set up such a platform together. You know the commons....sometimes wins.
• alanpearce 9mo ago
  I used to work on for a company on a product that did exactly this, but the company stopped working on that product since it didn't go anywhere (API docs seem to still be online though :D https://docs.satoshipay.io/api/ https://docs.satoshipay.io/api/). Some small publishers liked it, big ones wanted to force their customers to subscribe (whilst recording their data at the same time). I really like the general idea though and hope it does make a comeback. I think it would be good for review/test sites especially.
• cranberryturkey 9mo ago
  [dead]
• mihaic 9mo ago
  I've made a start-up that has really tried making micropayments work (blink.net) and I know there have been many other attempts. Some of the pain points can always be addressed, as it's just implementation difficulty (having an auto-pay system when opening and article, and actually being able to get a refund within a short time window if the title was clickbait -- with some limitations of course). The main problems that always remained were: - the dificutly in convincing a user to actually pay, which was a psichological barrier. People also don't understand that many articles would have to be priced at 20-50 cents, even more, to be worth it, or there should be an issue pass with the actual price of the whole issue. - the publishing industry being a mess, hard to coordinate as everyone wants to do their own thing, and early experiments failing, ruining the reputation of the idea itself. Many people say micropayments are something that needs a good time, but nobody knows when that time will come. - the huge fees that processors take (2% + 29 cents), meaning we needed to load into a wallet a minimum of 5$. After learning all the tricks of the industry, I felt a need to throw rotten tomatoes at whoever thinks that cashback should be legal. The combination always made it a horrible problem, and at this point I'm even considering making the existing project a non-profit, if that might get something off the ground, but now it's just in low-maintenance mode.
  • wombat-man 9mo ago
    This is just off the cuff, but I could go for something sort of like a 'daily paper' deal where I get debited a couple bucks for access to the news papers site for a day, or maybe even just the materials published that day, but that sort of seems more complicated to implement. Then, if I'm reading it so often that it would be more cost effective to just subscribe they can start pinging me about it.
    • mihaic 9mo ago
      We have that implemented, it's just that nobody wanted it. Our pitch basically was that "Why can you buy today's paper on the stand, but can't do the same digitally?" Turn out the answer is complicated.
• KellyCriterion 9mo ago
  Pro Tipp: Use Revolut or Privacy.com and create a new virtual number, then buy with this the "1 month for free for 1 USD" testsubscription here and there - then you just cancel/destroy the virtual number immediately
  • senko 9mo ago
    If you're going to do that, just using archive.is is easier on everyone around.
    • KellyCriterion 9mo ago
      In my country there are some newspaper/magazines/etc. which are prohibiting Archive.IS/PH very very good because of their detection - at some this is working.
      • ouhamouch 9mo ago
        Don't forget to donate your $1 access token to the archive; you might be the first and only compatriot to do so.
        • KellyCriterion 9mo ago
          Cool idea! Didnt know this is possible!
• infecto 9mo ago
  I have long been a big proponent of micropayments. I wish more news sites tested it out. Heck any kind of site, don’t bother me with a notification that I am using an adblocker, just ask in same pop up for me to pay $0.1 to view the page or whatever the market rate is.
• elric 9mo ago
  This is a problem that I've been thinking on for years now. It used to be common to just buy a newspaper without handing out any kind of personal information. Walk up to a newsagent/kiosk, hand over a small amount of money, and voila, you have your news. Then came subscriptions. Great for publishers and advertisers: they have predictibility in how many papers to print, know exactly when and where to deliver them, and advertisers know exactly how many people their printed ads will reach. But it came at the cost of having to provide the paper (or their distributor, maybe your local paper boy) with your address and payment details. Then came news sites. Initially entirely free because the web was new and no one knew what they were doing. Then with ads. Then with more and more intrusive ads, which started harvesting and stealing personal information against our wishes, which started being used to create highly specific profiles of people. To all the better serve more ads. Then came paywalls. Where in order to read an article, you now have to go through to the ads/profiling spiel, AND on top of that you have to hand out your name/address/email/payment details just to read a single god damned article. I would love for us to have a way to go back to the original situation. I give you money, and only money, you give me news. No name. No address. No ad profiling. Zilch. But because of a fear of terrorists, anonymous payments on the interwebs are effectively impossible. It's a sad state of affairs, really.
• lofaszvanitt 9mo ago
  This has to be done on gov level to neuter this fn you have to show ads to stay afloat bullsheeet.