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.
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.
There's a particular part in the discussion that rubs me the wrong way (which is more about micropayments as alternative to ads, rather than micropayments themselves)
It tends to go something like, if not micropayments then ads, if not ads then subscriptions. And people dislike subscriptions more than ads, and ads more than micropayments so the conclusion is micropayments.
But I don't like the way ads are presented as inevitable. Usually in some alarmist fashion listing all the stuff that would work should this revenue cease.
Ads are a way for the incumbent to seek rent, the eventual return on investment after destroying all alternatives.
So don't complain to me what will happen when I decline to download ads over _my_ network, send tracking from _my_ devices, show them on _my_ screens. When people start listing the giants that will topple the only word that crosses my mind is
I don't think most people mind ads. Throw up an animated gif or a jpg banner that you serve from your domain. Nobody is blocking that.
What people dislike are mountains of javascript that track everything you do across broad swathes of the internet and then sell that to businesses and governments that are effectively engaging in mass psychological experiments on us.
Newspapers were already bundled that way: you got national news, local news, business news, sports, the funny pages, classifieds, wire stories from AP & Reuters, etc.
Then they went onto the web and were forced to prioritize, but where the entire bundling idea falls apart is you’re suggesting that we bundle the bundles.
Here’s the harsh reality: most news is already priced appropriately for the value that it delivers to most people, and for most people, most news is worth $0.00.
I pay for the news I want to read already, both websites and podcasts, and I pay directly for it. But no matter how many New York Times or USA Today or other random news links my friends send me, or whatever else I run into on the open web when I’m checking someone’s sources, I will never pay greater than $0.00 for it. Not $0.99, $0.01, not $0.001, not even $0.0001. If I have to engage in a financial transaction just for clicking a link, then I’m not clicking the link and I’ll start demanding that citations to be delivered to me in a form I can read instead, and probably stop providing links in turn. Other people will do the same.
And for those rare publications that people both want to read and also are willing to pay for en masse? Stuff like the Wall Street Journal? They’re never going to devalue themselves by getting in the bundle. Even with Apple News which famously has a partnership with the WSJ specifically, they withhold their most valuable stories, the stuff that people buy the Wall Street Journal for because they’re the value drivers in any potential partnership. Almost every other publication that would stand to benefit would in effect be free-riding off the WSJ’s largesse.
> then I’m not clicking the link and I’ll start demanding that citations to be delivered to me in a form I can read instead, and probably stop providing links in turn.
I’m going to go out on a feedback shaped limb and say that demanding things like this from friends isn’t an appealing trait. If they are suggesting it to you, that’s not enough to justify 1/100th of a cent?
Brother.
Read what they send you or don’t, and by all means communicate your preferences, but saying that you’re not going to share with others in retaliation is… I mean it’s definitely a vibe!
Okay, but why would newspapers looking for revenue sources concern themselves with the opinions of somebody who would never pay them no matter what circumstances? You're not a potential customer, so a non-entity in their concerns.
> You're not a potential customer, so a non-entity in their concerns.
A small correction: I am a potential customer, at least in the general sense. I am someone that subscribes to news publications as I already pointed out. Who I pay in any given month is not set in stone, and the news market is still somehow strangely dynamic with new options replacing old ones all the time.
But if I’m paying, then it’s a subscriber-provider relationship; not a virtual bazaar transaction made by clicking a link.
But you're not doing micropayments, you're using metered billing. There's a big difference.
For one, you have a request. The answer isn't going to be anywhere else. Sure, you can't be guaranteed the quality in advance, but you are guaranteed to not have an answer without submitting the request. This doesn't work in a field where so many see news as commoditized, and can just get a free article or headline elsewhere.
Some of this issue is the nature of news. With an LLM, the providers just run the infrastructure anyway, and your request is routed to it. They develop new models constantly, and deploy. News does not work like this.
If you have to grab someone's attention to read an article, that's an incentive structure that creates clickbait and other things people hate. You may offer a headline, but that is very often the only part of the story people care about. (Oh, Robert Duvall died? That's sad. But I don't need to pay anything to read anymore -- I already know the story!)
It also does nothing for the piracy that is so rampant -- especially on this site. How many people post archive links to articles with paywalls? Would that stop? Getting a fraction of a cent or so before someone else copies the article is absolutely not a business model.
A lot of cloud services sorta work the same way. AWS and Azure are pay per request for all sorts of things, I figured that was the model the inference providers were following.
I would consider a lot of mobile apps to also be a 'micro-payment' type model. Clearly there's no issue with people paying for content, I think the real gap here is in the ability for the consumer to pay for the content. If I go to some random news site and it hits me with a paywall for a micro-payment there isn't a simple system by which I can actually give them money without directly signing up for a subscription to that specific site or some other service. If there was a type of wallet for this that I could just put money into and sites asked "would you like to pay X amount from your wallet to read this content?" I would be more amenable to it. It's the same idea with streaming sites and piracy. Companies have made content more expensive and more exclusive so why would I want to jump through the extra hurdles which was supposed to make consuming your content EASIER. It's always about ease of access to the consumer.
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.
Please help me understand better, because it feels like part of the problem has already been solved. Specifically, I've been told that the independent journalists that I watch on YouTube Premium receive a portion of my subscription fee. Is that not a form of micropayments? The system seems to work well enough for videos. Isn't there some way to adapt that kind of system to other media?
Decentralized or direct P2P micropayments are unlikely to work, true. But why are there so few attempts at centralized micropayments providers? The only success stories I see in the space are GitHub Sponsors and LiberaPay, where their entire thing is aggregating payments together (so you have 1 big card transaction a month per user, not 20 small ones) and doing KYC procedures with donation receivers (once GitHub, or rather Stripe, says you are legit, you can take money from any GitHub user).
Everything you say makes sense. But can you help me understand why this doesn't also apply to the LLM service I use today? Doesn't that service, in effect, makes a "micropayment" to the LLM providers every time I make a query? Is the key difference that there are only a small-ish number of LLM providers? (Not doubting, just interested!)
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.
Isn't this the main complaint people had about cable packages though? People were tired of paying $100/mo and only watching 10 channels out of 150.
I came across a startup awhile ago that was handling the micropayments for you and you paid a monthly subscription fee which is similar to what you want. I think the main issue is getting every publisher to agree to onboard to your platform before you have sufficient scale of paying customers.
It's a misunderstanding of the payment model really. No one watches 150 channels, the pricing is based on you being the average person who watches a subset of them, but it doesn't cost them any extra to provide all of them.
Regular users also don't really like usage based fees which is why every consumer plan has a fixed price rather than paying per use. Cloud storage for example charging you for "up to x gb" rather than "$x per gb".
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".)
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.
>I am never going to pay one publication a small fee every time I read an article
That's fine for you, but I also pay for subscriptions and have 8-10 publications that I'm not interested in subscribing to, but would pay some amount to read the odd adhoc article from them.
It's a hard game to figure out, because many sites feel like they're worth $20/mo, which is true if you are reading a large amount of their content. But if I'm looking at 1-4 articles a month from them, that's a huge per-article price, even a $1/article micropayment would be a deal for me. Add on top of that the shenanigans they play with ending subscriptions at so many of the sites...
Maybe this is a silly question, but why don’t more publications offer multiple options? They’d have to tweak it some as they go but it seems to me it could be worth it
>That model is completely counter-intuitive and punitive to the consumer.
I disagree with this so much. Paying for a thing once and getting the thing is absolutely intuitive. Subscription models where you pay generally for access over a time period to a broad swath of things is counter-intuitive. I want to read a handful of articles from NYT a month. I will never sign up for a subscription for that, so I just don’t really get to read NYT articles. I’m sure there is an amount I could agree to pay for an article.
Before the time you mention, the common model for TV was, you bought a TV, and you got as many channels as your antenna could pick up, all for free. Advertisers fought over the privilege of having access to your living room so much so that they sponsored whole shows, as they had with radio before TV. From this revenue, every local station was able to put together a news broadcast, and national networks broadcast the national news every evening, all for free as far as the viewer was concerned. This was the golden age of journalism, back when people believed the journalists [0].
Somehow all the media advances, the democratizing influence of the internet, the rise of social media, and the ubiquity of constant streams of news in various forms has just made the news more expensive and less trusted.
And, frankly, anyone even remotely considering microtransactions needs to take into account that one third of the population distrusts the media and another third gives it no credibility whatsoever—and money in the form of microtransactions would have to follow credibility, because nobody pays for what he believes is a lie.
Which is why ideally both systems would exist. Some people prefer to read the same few publications all the time. Others (like myself) browse extensively and regularly come across paywalled articles. I'm clearly not going to shell out a monthly or yearly subscription to read a single article I find interesting, especially if this meant spending thousands and thousands of dollars on hundreds of subscriptions to read all of the paywalled articles I run across. But if there was a button on top that said, "click here to pay .22 cents and gain access to this article", I'd be happy to do it. I could read a a dozen paywalled articles a day from across a range of publications and it would cost about as much as a cup of coffee.
Under the current system, we both lose out. I can't read the paywalled article and the publication doesn't get any of my money.
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.
What about movie rentals on various platforms like Youtube. They are more in the domain of "milli"-payments, but they do share the feature that you don't know if you will like the movie until after you have watched part of it.
I also don't have any proof that the article will be any good. When buying a whole newspaper for the day, if some of the articles are suboptimal, I can still make money from the reliably good stuff. But if I go look at an article, am I getting something good, or is it regurgitated Reuters I read before, plain AI, or completely wrong? The barrier is too high if I don't have a lot of faith in the source, and if I do, I should just subscribe
Sure, but if a source routinely clickbaits you/has a worse than expected article, you learn to avoid it (or even add a "don't show me this source" rule).
As long as the sources last long enough for reputation to build naturally (so, not the Amazon LLC model), it should all come out in the wash pretty reasonably.
I've spoken to a german news outlet a while back, and that was my contention too: I don't know if the article will be any good.
My suggestion was as follows:
Start the article by providing the dry facts - the meat of the article - in a super condensed format, so people get it as quickly as possible. Then, ask for money to get the rest - the analysis, the "whodunit", the "how we got there", the background, the bio's, and everything else. And then tell people: "If this interests you, you can pay $0.xx to read the rest of our article about it, including: (insert bullet points I just mentioned)"
The first section acts as proof that the person writing the article did their research; the rest is for those who are genuinely interested in the topic. It prevents disappointment and tells you clearly and transparently what you're getting for you cents.
I don't think the company did it in the end. They're struggling.
"Community" might be the hook, not the content itself. That's the way it works right now even in the pure editorial garbage piles. They might not always pay for the content directly, but they get revenue through high-margin merchandise, advertising, and scams. But you might imagine positioning as "I'm a XYZ reader." Still feels weak, but that's all we've got. The internet killed content scarcity. The product is not the content. The product is the way reading / watching / paying for it makes you feel. It is church. It is a tithing. A community subscription service.
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.
Handle it this way - a user has Silver tier coin subscription, gold tier coin subscription, and platinum tier coin subscription that they pay in per month. I'll set hypothetical prices at 15, 30 and 60 dollars. Over the course of a month, you look at articles without making decisions about whether to buy them one way or another - you just have your "tab" and the article loads as-is. Then, at the end of the month, mycrowpaymint.biz tallies up how many articles you read * each article's relative cost multiplier from what different news sites (15% forbes, 30% percent NYT, 10 percent utne reader, 45 percent random YouTube videos) and then remits the subscription revenue to each publisher based on the percentage used. For flexibility's sake, maybe the publisher was hoping to get 17 dollars coin based, PAYG revenue off of a 15 subscription at 80 percent utilization, but them's the breaks, because in other months they'll get more revenue than they would expect because a customer engaged with less content overall. Obviously, the existence of tier limits would be for those cases where someone tries to look at a thousand different articles on a silver plan, and perhaps Financial Times would only allow Platinum subscribers to work with this plan, but the reduction in friction, ease of subscription management for the customer, and equitable financial allocation would (I believe) make such a scheme viable.
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).
Maybe initially you wouldn’t know if an article would be good. But over time you could probably make reasonable guesses from the author/headline/title combination.
Great now I need to pay attention to the authors and make a mental mapping of who the good ones are to decide if the friction is worth it. That in itself adds more friction which in turn makes the barrier higher.
That is a correct evaluation of this. I've worked in marketing for a longer while and your instincts are spot on.
In media generation, such as music, streaming, articles, etc the only thing that gets people to fork over money regularly is if they're a fan of some sort. The patronage system. That means they have to like you and come back to you so often that they'll feel a connection - and they'll want to support you out of the goodness of their heart. This is the strategy used by streamers, by buskers on the street, and by content creators of all sort.
The main issue with applying this to articles is that most news is discovered by way of google news, or a similar hub site, which sometimes will present news from you - but it won't happen often enough to create such a connection. One may ask if the frequency of this happening is deliberately that low, compared to social algorithms on other products, where return visits are encouraged - if you like a tweet, you get more tweets from that same person; if you like a short, you get more youtube shorts from that channel; and so on.
Ultimately for news you have to be so large that people will come to you on their own, without being funneled through google news. This works for huge news sites - the register, NYT, Golem, etc. There is no way for a small site to break through like that. I think the last time I've seen this get pulled off successfully - a website started from 0 generating a cult following - was Drudge Report.
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...
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> As I have described earlier, the race to the bottom is a feature, not a bug. It encourages other sites to mirror your content.
The problem is that bottom in this case is “free, with ads.” As soon as you post your well researched expensive to produce content, I will summarise it and offer 90% of the experience for free. That’s if Google doesn’t do it first with AI summaries.
There are plenty of crypto projects that tried to do micropayments. They failed mainly due to technical reasons but if they had worked they still would not have gained traction - nobody wants micropayments.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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)
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.
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...
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.
+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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
The person comparing LLM micropayments to news micropayments makes an interesting point. The friction tolerance is surprisingly high when the value proposition is clear and immediate.
The real blocker has always been payment rails, not willingness. Credit card processing makes anything under ~$0.30 economically irrational. Lightning Network and L2 stablecoins have changed that math completely — sub-cent transactions with near-zero fees are live today.
The bundling debate is a red herring. What killed micropayments in 2005 was Visa minimums, not user psychology. Now that the infrastructure exists for actual sub-penny settlement, the experiment deserves a rerun with modern rails.
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.
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.
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)
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.
It's almost certainly going to get enshittified eventually, but more than that, it purposely pushing a false "Left vs Right" narrative about news. That's part of the problem.
Also the way they summarize every story into just a few bullet points (which, if it isn't already written by AI, surely will be) IMO is actively downplaying important issues, in an attempt to defuse false energy in reporting of less important issues. Artificially downplaying serious stuff is as detrimental as artificially overplaying non-serious stuff.
The Google Pixel "news" feed has the same problem now that it does AI "summaries"
Like it's great that they aggregate a lot and show you articles from publications you wouldn't otherwise see, but I just cannot trust them in the future.
> ... 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.
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.
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.
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
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
> 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?
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.
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.
There's a particular part in the discussion that rubs me the wrong way (which is more about micropayments as alternative to ads, rather than micropayments themselves)
It tends to go something like, if not micropayments then ads, if not ads then subscriptions. And people dislike subscriptions more than ads, and ads more than micropayments so the conclusion is micropayments.
But I don't like the way ads are presented as inevitable. Usually in some alarmist fashion listing all the stuff that would work should this revenue cease.
Ads are a way for the incumbent to seek rent, the eventual return on investment after destroying all alternatives.
So don't complain to me what will happen when I decline to download ads over _my_ network, send tracking from _my_ devices, show them on _my_ screens. When people start listing the giants that will topple the only word that crosses my mind is
Good.
I don't think most people mind ads. Throw up an animated gif or a jpg banner that you serve from your domain. Nobody is blocking that.
What people dislike are mountains of javascript that track everything you do across broad swathes of the internet and then sell that to businesses and governments that are effectively engaging in mass psychological experiments on us.
[delayed]
Newspapers were already bundled that way: you got national news, local news, business news, sports, the funny pages, classifieds, wire stories from AP & Reuters, etc.
Then they went onto the web and were forced to prioritize, but where the entire bundling idea falls apart is you’re suggesting that we bundle the bundles.
Here’s the harsh reality: most news is already priced appropriately for the value that it delivers to most people, and for most people, most news is worth $0.00.
I pay for the news I want to read already, both websites and podcasts, and I pay directly for it. But no matter how many New York Times or USA Today or other random news links my friends send me, or whatever else I run into on the open web when I’m checking someone’s sources, I will never pay greater than $0.00 for it. Not $0.99, $0.01, not $0.001, not even $0.0001. If I have to engage in a financial transaction just for clicking a link, then I’m not clicking the link and I’ll start demanding that citations to be delivered to me in a form I can read instead, and probably stop providing links in turn. Other people will do the same.
And for those rare publications that people both want to read and also are willing to pay for en masse? Stuff like the Wall Street Journal? They’re never going to devalue themselves by getting in the bundle. Even with Apple News which famously has a partnership with the WSJ specifically, they withhold their most valuable stories, the stuff that people buy the Wall Street Journal for because they’re the value drivers in any potential partnership. Almost every other publication that would stand to benefit would in effect be free-riding off the WSJ’s largesse.
> then I’m not clicking the link and I’ll start demanding that citations to be delivered to me in a form I can read instead, and probably stop providing links in turn.
I’m going to go out on a feedback shaped limb and say that demanding things like this from friends isn’t an appealing trait. If they are suggesting it to you, that’s not enough to justify 1/100th of a cent?
Brother.
Read what they send you or don’t, and by all means communicate your preferences, but saying that you’re not going to share with others in retaliation is… I mean it’s definitely a vibe!
There are articles that have changed my outlook and life so much that months, years, decades later I would value them in the thousands.
Did you go on to write checks in the thousands to the writers or publications that produced them?
Okay, but why would newspapers looking for revenue sources concern themselves with the opinions of somebody who would never pay them no matter what circumstances? You're not a potential customer, so a non-entity in their concerns.
> You're not a potential customer, so a non-entity in their concerns.
A small correction: I am a potential customer, at least in the general sense. I am someone that subscribes to news publications as I already pointed out. Who I pay in any given month is not set in stone, and the news market is still somehow strangely dynamic with new options replacing old ones all the time.
But if I’m paying, then it’s a subscriber-provider relationship; not a virtual bazaar transaction made by clicking a link.
But you're not doing micropayments, you're using metered billing. There's a big difference.
For one, you have a request. The answer isn't going to be anywhere else. Sure, you can't be guaranteed the quality in advance, but you are guaranteed to not have an answer without submitting the request. This doesn't work in a field where so many see news as commoditized, and can just get a free article or headline elsewhere.
Micropayments have been tried over and over (see https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/08/the-poster-child-for-micro...)
Some of this issue is the nature of news. With an LLM, the providers just run the infrastructure anyway, and your request is routed to it. They develop new models constantly, and deploy. News does not work like this.
If you have to grab someone's attention to read an article, that's an incentive structure that creates clickbait and other things people hate. You may offer a headline, but that is very often the only part of the story people care about. (Oh, Robert Duvall died? That's sad. But I don't need to pay anything to read anymore -- I already know the story!)
It also does nothing for the piracy that is so rampant -- especially on this site. How many people post archive links to articles with paywalls? Would that stop? Getting a fraction of a cent or so before someone else copies the article is absolutely not a business model.
Curiously, LLMs seem to be the first successful use case for micropayments.
Possibly this happened because a) the vendors only offered a micropayment model and b) the product was so popular that nobody pushed back.
That said we can see LLM inference being sold on a subscription basis commonly now (e.g. Claude Code).
A lot of cloud services sorta work the same way. AWS and Azure are pay per request for all sorts of things, I figured that was the model the inference providers were following.
I would consider a lot of mobile apps to also be a 'micro-payment' type model. Clearly there's no issue with people paying for content, I think the real gap here is in the ability for the consumer to pay for the content. If I go to some random news site and it hits me with a paywall for a micro-payment there isn't a simple system by which I can actually give them money without directly signing up for a subscription to that specific site or some other service. If there was a type of wallet for this that I could just put money into and sites asked "would you like to pay X amount from your wallet to read this content?" I would be more amenable to it. It's the same idea with streaming sites and piracy. Companies have made content more expensive and more exclusive so why would I want to jump through the extra hurdles which was supposed to make consuming your content EASIER. It's always about ease of access to the consumer.
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.
Please help me understand better, because it feels like part of the problem has already been solved. Specifically, I've been told that the independent journalists that I watch on YouTube Premium receive a portion of my subscription fee. Is that not a form of micropayments? The system seems to work well enough for videos. Isn't there some way to adapt that kind of system to other media?
Decentralized or direct P2P micropayments are unlikely to work, true. But why are there so few attempts at centralized micropayments providers? The only success stories I see in the space are GitHub Sponsors and LiberaPay, where their entire thing is aggregating payments together (so you have 1 big card transaction a month per user, not 20 small ones) and doing KYC procedures with donation receivers (once GitHub, or rather Stripe, says you are legit, you can take money from any GitHub user).
Everything you say makes sense. But can you help me understand why this doesn't also apply to the LLM service I use today? Doesn't that service, in effect, makes a "micropayment" to the LLM providers every time I make a query? Is the key difference that there are only a small-ish number of LLM providers? (Not doubting, just interested!)
If only there was some sort of alternate monetary system based on cryptography that enabled instant micro payments.
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.
Isn't this the main complaint people had about cable packages though? People were tired of paying $100/mo and only watching 10 channels out of 150.
I came across a startup awhile ago that was handling the micropayments for you and you paid a monthly subscription fee which is similar to what you want. I think the main issue is getting every publisher to agree to onboard to your platform before you have sufficient scale of paying customers.
It's a misunderstanding of the payment model really. No one watches 150 channels, the pricing is based on you being the average person who watches a subset of them, but it doesn't cost them any extra to provide all of them.
Regular users also don't really like usage based fees which is why every consumer plan has a fixed price rather than paying per use. Cloud storage for example charging you for "up to x gb" rather than "$x per gb".
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".)
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.
That’s the Spotify model.
>I am never going to pay one publication a small fee every time I read an article
That's fine for you, but I also pay for subscriptions and have 8-10 publications that I'm not interested in subscribing to, but would pay some amount to read the odd adhoc article from them.
It's a hard game to figure out, because many sites feel like they're worth $20/mo, which is true if you are reading a large amount of their content. But if I'm looking at 1-4 articles a month from them, that's a huge per-article price, even a $1/article micropayment would be a deal for me. Add on top of that the shenanigans they play with ending subscriptions at so many of the sites...
Maybe this is a silly question, but why don’t more publications offer multiple options? They’d have to tweak it some as they go but it seems to me it could be worth it
> What I _would _do is pay a flat fee to subscribe to several publications.
Apple News+ is ~$13
https://www.apple.com/apple-news/
The list of publications included
https://www.apple.com/apple-news/publications/
$13/month is less than many of those sites cost individually, but I get them all for that price?
>That model is completely counter-intuitive and punitive to the consumer.
I disagree with this so much. Paying for a thing once and getting the thing is absolutely intuitive. Subscription models where you pay generally for access over a time period to a broad swath of things is counter-intuitive. I want to read a handful of articles from NYT a month. I will never sign up for a subscription for that, so I just don’t really get to read NYT articles. I’m sure there is an amount I could agree to pay for an article.
Ok a group discount for multiple sites, just allocate money based on which article people click on and you have micropayments.
It used to be that the common model in the USA for tv was, one cable bundle with 500 channels. That has now evolved to a combination of
- cable bundles
- aggregate streams (Netflix, Prime, Apple TV)
- pay per view (Prime or YT TV)
And somehow all of these models now coexist.
Before the time you mention, the common model for TV was, you bought a TV, and you got as many channels as your antenna could pick up, all for free. Advertisers fought over the privilege of having access to your living room so much so that they sponsored whole shows, as they had with radio before TV. From this revenue, every local station was able to put together a news broadcast, and national networks broadcast the national news every evening, all for free as far as the viewer was concerned. This was the golden age of journalism, back when people believed the journalists [0].
Somehow all the media advances, the democratizing influence of the internet, the rise of social media, and the ubiquity of constant streams of news in various forms has just made the news more expensive and less trusted.
And, frankly, anyone even remotely considering microtransactions needs to take into account that one third of the population distrusts the media and another third gives it no credibility whatsoever—and money in the form of microtransactions would have to follow credibility, because nobody pays for what he believes is a lie.
[0] https://news.gallup.com/poll/651977/americans-trust-media-re...
Which is why ideally both systems would exist. Some people prefer to read the same few publications all the time. Others (like myself) browse extensively and regularly come across paywalled articles. I'm clearly not going to shell out a monthly or yearly subscription to read a single article I find interesting, especially if this meant spending thousands and thousands of dollars on hundreds of subscriptions to read all of the paywalled articles I run across. But if there was a button on top that said, "click here to pay .22 cents and gain access to this article", I'd be happy to do it. I could read a a dozen paywalled articles a day from across a range of publications and it would cost about as much as a cup of coffee.
Under the current system, we both lose out. I can't read the paywalled article and the publication doesn't get any of my money.
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.
What about movie rentals on various platforms like Youtube. They are more in the domain of "milli"-payments, but they do share the feature that you don't know if you will like the movie until after you have watched part of it.
I also don't have any proof that the article will be any good. When buying a whole newspaper for the day, if some of the articles are suboptimal, I can still make money from the reliably good stuff. But if I go look at an article, am I getting something good, or is it regurgitated Reuters I read before, plain AI, or completely wrong? The barrier is too high if I don't have a lot of faith in the source, and if I do, I should just subscribe
Sure, but if a source routinely clickbaits you/has a worse than expected article, you learn to avoid it (or even add a "don't show me this source" rule).
As long as the sources last long enough for reputation to build naturally (so, not the Amazon LLC model), it should all come out in the wash pretty reasonably.
But if you're only paying a penny the risk is tolerable.
I've spoken to a german news outlet a while back, and that was my contention too: I don't know if the article will be any good.
My suggestion was as follows:
Start the article by providing the dry facts - the meat of the article - in a super condensed format, so people get it as quickly as possible. Then, ask for money to get the rest - the analysis, the "whodunit", the "how we got there", the background, the bio's, and everything else. And then tell people: "If this interests you, you can pay $0.xx to read the rest of our article about it, including: (insert bullet points I just mentioned)"
The first section acts as proof that the person writing the article did their research; the rest is for those who are genuinely interested in the topic. It prevents disappointment and tells you clearly and transparently what you're getting for you cents.
I don't think the company did it in the end. They're struggling.
"Community" might be the hook, not the content itself. That's the way it works right now even in the pure editorial garbage piles. They might not always pay for the content directly, but they get revenue through high-margin merchandise, advertising, and scams. But you might imagine positioning as "I'm a XYZ reader." Still feels weak, but that's all we've got. The internet killed content scarcity. The product is not the content. The product is the way reading / watching / paying for it makes you feel. It is church. It is a tithing. A community subscription service.
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.
Handle it this way - a user has Silver tier coin subscription, gold tier coin subscription, and platinum tier coin subscription that they pay in per month. I'll set hypothetical prices at 15, 30 and 60 dollars. Over the course of a month, you look at articles without making decisions about whether to buy them one way or another - you just have your "tab" and the article loads as-is. Then, at the end of the month, mycrowpaymint.biz tallies up how many articles you read * each article's relative cost multiplier from what different news sites (15% forbes, 30% percent NYT, 10 percent utne reader, 45 percent random YouTube videos) and then remits the subscription revenue to each publisher based on the percentage used. For flexibility's sake, maybe the publisher was hoping to get 17 dollars coin based, PAYG revenue off of a 15 subscription at 80 percent utilization, but them's the breaks, because in other months they'll get more revenue than they would expect because a customer engaged with less content overall. Obviously, the existence of tier limits would be for those cases where someone tries to look at a thousand different articles on a silver plan, and perhaps Financial Times would only allow Platinum subscribers to work with this plan, but the reduction in friction, ease of subscription management for the customer, and equitable financial allocation would (I believe) make such a scheme viable.
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).
What’s a paywall busting link?
archive.whatever links
Maybe initially you wouldn’t know if an article would be good. But over time you could probably make reasonable guesses from the author/headline/title combination.
Great now I need to pay attention to the authors and make a mental mapping of who the good ones are to decide if the friction is worth it. That in itself adds more friction which in turn makes the barrier higher.
I mean that's just how reading works.
That is a correct evaluation of this. I've worked in marketing for a longer while and your instincts are spot on.
In media generation, such as music, streaming, articles, etc the only thing that gets people to fork over money regularly is if they're a fan of some sort. The patronage system. That means they have to like you and come back to you so often that they'll feel a connection - and they'll want to support you out of the goodness of their heart. This is the strategy used by streamers, by buskers on the street, and by content creators of all sort.
The main issue with applying this to articles is that most news is discovered by way of google news, or a similar hub site, which sometimes will present news from you - but it won't happen often enough to create such a connection. One may ask if the frequency of this happening is deliberately that low, compared to social algorithms on other products, where return visits are encouraged - if you like a tweet, you get more tweets from that same person; if you like a short, you get more youtube shorts from that channel; and so on.
Ultimately for news you have to be so large that people will come to you on their own, without being funneled through google news. This works for huge news sites - the register, NYT, Golem, etc. There is no way for a small site to break through like that. I think the last time I've seen this get pulled off successfully - a website started from 0 generating a cult following - was Drudge Report.
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...
> 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.
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.
If micropayments have a future, it's on blockchains.
https://www.x402.org/
https://www.8004scan.io/networks
https://www.x402scan.com/
Why? What does adding a slow database to the process help?
This sounds like a reflexive "I hate blockchain and cryptocurrency" reaction but I'll give a reply regardless.
You can't do transactions with just a database. You'd have to add a payment processor. Now things are getting wildly complex.
x402 is designed with agentic AIs in mind. AIs make mistakes. Having an immutable record that can't be tampered with is a nice layer of security.
And while I haven't worked with it personally, I understand x402 to be extremely straight forward for devs to implement.
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.
This is all absolutely impenetrable.
"if I keep jamming things into this hole, something will eventually fit, I just know it!"
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.
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.
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
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.
> As I have described earlier, the race to the bottom is a feature, not a bug. It encourages other sites to mirror your content.
The problem is that bottom in this case is “free, with ads.” As soon as you post your well researched expensive to produce content, I will summarise it and offer 90% of the experience for free. That’s if Google doesn’t do it first with AI summaries.
There are plenty of crypto projects that tried to do micropayments. They failed mainly due to technical reasons but if they had worked they still would not have gained traction - nobody wants micropayments.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
There was
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.
Scroll was successful. I had a subscription, and it worked on multiple sites that I was visiting.
So Twitter acquired and killed it.
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.
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?
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
OK but the difference between $0.00 and $0.01 is also 1 cent.
And your data.
Easier to just not be informed about local events.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
If you thought clickbait headlines were annoying when people were competing for ad impressions, just wait until they’re competing for micropayments.
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...
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.
Apple news is around with that model. Not sure how successful they are though.
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.
+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.
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?
We also have PBS as a model.
Until it gets defunded based on the whims of the administration :(
That doesn't change the fact that it worked for fifty five years.
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.
Exactly! That's why Spotify doesn't allow any noisy music or music with curse words. The mainstream public would flee from the platform.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
The person comparing LLM micropayments to news micropayments makes an interesting point. The friction tolerance is surprisingly high when the value proposition is clear and immediate.
The real blocker has always been payment rails, not willingness. Credit card processing makes anything under ~$0.30 economically irrational. Lightning Network and L2 stablecoins have changed that math completely — sub-cent transactions with near-zero fees are live today.
The bundling debate is a red herring. What killed micropayments in 2005 was Visa minimums, not user psychology. Now that the infrastructure exists for actual sub-penny settlement, the experiment deserves a rerun with modern rails.
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.
Isn’t that “Basic Attention Token”?
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.
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)
If bots could be forced to pay per crawl somehow, it would subsidize nearly all legit user traffic.
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.
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.
Ground news is a YC alum isn't it?
It's almost certainly going to get enshittified eventually, but more than that, it purposely pushing a false "Left vs Right" narrative about news. That's part of the problem.
Also the way they summarize every story into just a few bullet points (which, if it isn't already written by AI, surely will be) IMO is actively downplaying important issues, in an attempt to defuse false energy in reporting of less important issues. Artificially downplaying serious stuff is as detrimental as artificially overplaying non-serious stuff.
The Google Pixel "news" feed has the same problem now that it does AI "summaries"
Like it's great that they aggregate a lot and show you articles from publications you wouldn't otherwise see, but I just cannot trust them in the future.
> ... 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
I'd rather think about micropayments than think about subscriptions.
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
> 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?
Which tech billionaires are trying to bury us in extreme left wing bullshit?
If you're not able to objectively observe bias in media, it simply means that one side's bullshit has worked on you.