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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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!
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?
Micropayments are friction, and if you put friction on top of the work of discovery, I will do something else with my time.
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...
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.
The scale of the decisions doesn't align.
Flattr required installing an extension (sorry, no), Brave is a whole separate browser, Coil was based around cryptocrap.
Scroll also used a browser extension by the way.
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.
In Digital Media Lost the Newsstand. Micropayments Are the Obvious Way Back, Rick Bruner makes the case for giving micropayments another try.
The internet has dramatically diversified reading patterns. In the print era, readers subscribed to a small, fixed set of publications constrained by geography, distribution, and cost. Today, thanks to search, aggregators, and social sharing, readers routinely consume journalism from dozens of sources in the course of a month, including international and niche publications that were previously inaccessible. This has expanded total news consumption while weakening the economic link between any individual reader and any individual publisher. As a result, large portions of valuable readership generate little or no direct revenue. Micropayments convert that fragmented, currently untapped demand into incremental revenue without undermining the subscription base.
And—like any other payments directly from readers—micropayments would be a multiplier for advertising, not an alternative.
In a marketplace increasingly distorted by bot activity and opaque platform reporting, micropayment histories give publishers a powerful, independent way to demonstrate the authenticity and engagement of their audience, strengthening their position with advertisers and supporting premium pricing.
The 404 Media team explains the value of a known human audience in We Need Your Email Address. Meanwhile, Subscription revenue is growing at big news publishers even as traffic shrinks, and that’s good news for legit sites—stuck in a struggle for ad budgets with Big Tech oligarchs who want to bury us in deepfakes, extreme right wing bullshit and AI slop until nobody trusts anybody.
Clay Shirky’s old argument against micropayments from 2003, based on mental transaction costs, doesn’t work so well any more. We know that micropayments can work because mobile games are a thing. Shirky was probably right for the micropayments of his day, but mobile game developers have figured out how to get people to spend money on in-app-purchases (IAP), by turning it into a two-step process.
exchange real money for in-game coins—which feels like you’re not spending, just exchanging one currency for another.
exchange in-game coins for an in-game asset—which feels like you’re not spending real money.
A brilliant cognitive trick that works in all kinds of games. Of course, it doesn’t work on everybody. Figure about half of adults play mobile games, and about 80 percent of those make an in-app purchase. But if the numbers for a pay by the article system were similar, that would result in enough payment records to enable an advertiser to tell a legit site—where somebody spends a coin every so often—apart from an AI slop site.
So it doesn’t seem like micropayments are necessarily unworkable—and with a powerful industry devoted to pushing misinformation and slop, legit content needs every human attention metric it can get—but the tricky part is how to introduce micropayments. Publishers look at their subscriber metrics and realize that a lot of subscribers read few enough stories that they would save a lot of money by canceling and using micropayments instead.
So it might be better to introduce publisher coins as a bonus feature for subscribers, then let them leak out to non-subscribers. Instead of saying that you get 5 gift articles per month, say a gift article is 20 coins and you get 100 free coins a month. Then open them up to more uses. Another good lesson from how mobile games handle IAP coins is that they hand out a few to non-buyers to help develop the habit. As part of a direct sold ad deal, legit sites could issue a stack of coins to legit advertisers, to hand out to customers, event visitors, and others.
Measuring marketing is already hard enough without a determined set of adversaries in the picture. And with Big Tech under pressure to obfuscate and enshittify every data flow, marketers will need to look harder for trustworthy information. Rick Bruner again:
ROI for most advertisers is falling in inverse proportion to Big Tech valuations going up. Advertisers are steadily paying more for less ROI, and Google, Meta, and Amazon are laughing all the way to the blockchain.
If there is one thing marketers have even heard about causation — which, of course, is the ultimate point of advertising, causing consumers to buy your product who wouldn’t have otherwise — it is that correlation is not causation. But AI, you see, is nothing but correlation. Very fast and very sophisticated statistical inference. The fact remains that to truly know what is having an effect, you need to conduct a randomized experiment: subjects assigned at random to a test or control group, presented with an intervention where they are either treated or not with the stimulus of interest (the ad), and measured against the outcome of interest (incremental sales).
Unfortunately, legit sites are on a clock here. Right now the Big Tech companies are quietly pushing an in-browser advertising attribution tracking system through the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). It’s a complicated proposal, technically, but it aims to centralize attribution measurement at one chokepoint per browser vendor, so we can safely predict what the attribution reports are going to look like. beep, boop, the optimal place to spend your ad money is . . . whatever Performance Max (or other Big Tech ML) says is the right place to spend your ad money. If any attribution tracking reports start to come out looking favorable to legit sites—and potentially costing Big Tech’s misinfo and slop operations billions—then management will just demand changes to code, policies, and personnel until the numbers come out the way they want.
The survival of legit sites depends on how quickly marketers can level up to stuff like rickcentralcontrolcom/geo-rct-methodology and not just dump money and customer data in to Big Tech and get conversions out. The problem with marketing today isn’t that marketers have gotten “too technical” and ignored the creative mystique or whatever—it’s that marketers are so afraid to look “non-technical” by asking the hard questions.
Anyway, just going back and reading this, Rick Bruner has scored a content marketing win here. Start people off thinking about micropayments, and that ends up leading to the question of how to figure out which sites are for real, in the presence of so many gatekeepers with an interest in pushing the wrong answers? (and destroying the legit economy and crushing democracy, but that’s another story).
Right now a lot of sites have a lot of, let’s just say malarkey to get through before seeing the actual page.
“consent” dialogs (which don’t get real consent anyway, as Prof. Daniel Solove explains)
Email newsletter signups
Prompts to allow notifications
Sign in with (company name here)
A micropayment platform that can either eliminate those or act as a front end for them, to consolidate on zero or one roadblock to get through before reading, would be a user experience (and revenue) win. Piling another thing to click onto already long-suffering users is not the way to get people back to the web. More: time to sharpen your pencils, people
What’s next for Chinese open-source AI by Caiwei Chen. The adoption of Chinese models is picking up in Silicon Valley, too. Martin Casado, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, has put a number on it: Among startups pitching with open-source stacks, there’s about an 80% chance they’re running on Chinese open models…. (related: Please Don’t Say Mean Things about the AI That I Just Invested a Billion Dollars In, generative ai antimoats)
Why the World Is Drawing a Line on Social Media for Kids by Jon Haidt. (As far as I know, teens in Australia can still make GitHub and Wikipedia accounts. How did they manage to slice the definition of “social media”?)
EU Parliament blocks AI features over cyber, privacy fears by Ellen O’Regan and Max Griera. The latest move to switch off AI tools concerns built-in features like writing and summarizing assistants, enhanced virtual assistants and webpage summaries in both tablets and phones, an EU official said, granted anonymity to disclose details of the security policy.
Journalism Is Dead. Long Live Journalism by Rebecca Solnit. Silicon Valley created and abets this chaos, both by undermining the financial basis for traditional news by siphoning away its advertising revenue and audiences, and by creating tools and platforms where, over and over, from Facebook to Substack, the bosses insist they are defending free speech by not filtering out dangerous disinformation and hate speech.
EPIC Crafts 2026 Model Bill to Bolster Age-Appropriate Design Code Laws by Austin Jenkins. EPIC, which filed an amicus brief in the California case, said its model bill was carefully designed to avoid First Amendment issues and was built off of Vermont’s law, which was passed last year after input from EPIC staff.