Let's say a journalist writes an excellent article about something political of serious import. I'm fine with paying for that article to get access to it.
But, really, the article is a lot more useful to me if other people can access it too. Since everyone can vote, I want the whole populace to be informed, even poor people.
I wonder if there is a viable business model where for each article, readers can pay to unlock it not just for themselves, but for everyone. The price would obviously have to be higher since you aren't just buying it for yourself. But perhaps the sense of "I'm helping build a better-informed world and helping broadcast my values" would encourage people to pay that higher price.
Maybe you could do something cumulative and Kickstarter-like where there's a threshold for the article to be unlocked and anyone can chip in to getting it over the line. This would take advantage of human psychology that we like being part of something bigger than ourselves.
And it would hopefully have the emergent property that news that people feel is actually valuable gets spread more widely than useless junk.
You could even list the names of the sponsors of the article when it gets unlocked (if they didn't want to be anonymous). How cool would be to one of the people who helped an important story "break"?
I wonder if there is a viable business model where for each article, readers can pay to unlock it not just for themselves, but for everyone. The price would obviously have to be higher since you aren't just buying it for yourself. But perhaps the sense of "I'm helping build a better-informed world and helping broadcast my values" would encourage people to pay that higher price.
What you're asking for is the system we already have, except at a micro level rather than a macro level. Rich people buy out newspapers to signal-boost their own preferred messages to the public.
I think it's questionable that the "news that people feel is actually valuable" is what really ought to be spread. Some of the most valuable news is local reporting on the daily business of municipal governments. Regular people are notoriously uninterested in local politics, despite the outsized impact it has on their lives. Many of the most mundane decisions made in municipal councils go completely unnoticed yet they can destroy whole communities in the long run.
>Many of the most mundane decisions made in municipal councils go completely unnoticed yet they can destroy whole communities in the long run.
They go unnoticed because of scaling issues, not because people are per se less interested in local politics than national politics. If you write a story about a decision on the local city council, it is of interest to maybe a few hundred thousand, whereas a story about Congress is of interest to tens of millions. Even if people were ten times as interested in local news (as measured by their willingness to subscribe or the amount of ads they are willing to be exposed to), it would still make more sense to send a reporter to the Capitol before City Hall.
I think a lot of our issues today are because people are too engaged in federal politics. It's turned into a massive spectacle on the same level as the NFL.
> Everyone has the same and equal meaningless vote.
There is one vote that is not meaningless: the primaries. A lot of the issues y'all have is that Democrats and Republicans alike don't bother to vote in the primaries. That is how you got people like MTG or Trump, that is how you get people like Chuck Schumer stuck in office for far too long.
AOC/The Squad and Mamdani both proved that it is possible to succeed in a primary and offer voters an actual alternative to the corporate owned shills.
> not because people are per se less interested in local politics than national politics
Actually I believe this is exactly the issue. Most people are interested more in national politics than county or even state politics. Of the people I know who vote in national elections, very few vote in local ones or even go to city council meetings.
> Rich people buy out newspapers to signal-boost their own preferred messages to the public.
Right, but micro level difference matters here. If a middle-class person can help an important story reach an audience, that's helpful for democracy. When a billionaire buys a newspaper, it isn't.
This is also why I think suggesting it work like a kickstarter where multiple people can pool money to unlock an article would be helpful. It naturally collects the will of many people in a democratic way.
This is basically political fundraising, where rich people signal-boost their preferred candidate and help them attract lots of donors from the public.
I think the fundamental piece you're missing is the Pareto principle. In any popularity contest, the most attention accrues to the most popular. This naturally leads to a power law distribution in popularity.
The solution to increasing interest in local government is to strengthen the federal system (repealing the 17th amendment) & even extending it into state government (state senators should be appointed by, say, the city councils of the 24 largest municipalities in said state).
This decentralization of power would bring the peoples' focus back to their own neighborhoods, where they can actually hold government officials accountable.
That’s a recipe for corruption and minority rule. It centralizes, not decentralizes, power, in the hands of fewer people. I would advise looking to effectively any senatorial appointment from the gilded age to see why the 17th was needed: monetary exchanges for senatorial seats was widespread, race-based disenfranchisement was a reality, and in one state, Utah, a theocracy was nearly cemented. A greater focus on local rights, and greater federalist powers, should not preclude senatorial elections.
>> Maybe you could do something cumulative and Kickstarter-like where there's a threshold for the article to be unlocked and anyone can chip in to getting it over the line. This would take advantage of human psychology that we like being part of something bigger than ourselves.
This sort of happens with Substack, albiet not as explicitly. People become "Founding Sponsors" or "Paid Subscribers" and they effectively subsidize it for everyone else because they appreciate the author's work and want the author to succeed. Authors often want to give away the content since it is indeed better if everyone can read it (as you note) -- but often cannot sustain it without a minimum set of sponsors.
I think you are speaking about this happening at the article level rather than publication level, which seems pretty hard since the readership would be fractured and long-tailed.
You're basically describing the Random Model by Greg Stolze[0]
Basically someone creates a work and puts a price on it and then like with Kickstarter asks people to fund it, however after it's funded it becomes public and is released into the public domain
FWIW, LWN.net has a form of this, where a subscriber can share a "guest" link for a subscriber-only article (All such articles become open a week later anyhow).
It's bad form to share guest links on aggregators like HN, I don't think LWN has a quota on the number of accesses on Guest links. On the other hand, the occasional widely-shared guest link may bring a few more subscribers, but I doubt this scales.
It's actually not bad form to share guest links on aggregators, for that reason — we're entirely subscriber-funded, and we get a lot of new subscribers coming in via subscriber links, which is why we keep offering them. It's always nice when one of my articles end up being shared widely.
Although we do tend to notice trends in what kinds of articles make it onto aggregators like HN and which ones don't; if you've enjoyed LWN's technical reporting, but you've been getting it all filtered through HN or lobste.rs, you might like to come look at the website directly and see some of the wider content mix that we work on.
The system you describe is already implemented at least on this French independent media "Arrêt sur Images". Subscribers can vote to gift articles to the public.
Sorry to be the wet blanket but what you're arguing for, advocacy, is by far the worst and most ineffective form of doing politics. Talking about things doesn't convince anyone. Talking to the small amounts of people that agree doesn't get the balling moving.
Want to know what does? Organizing. Getting people that disagree with you, to agree with you. That never happens through advocacy, you have to organize.
Organizing is often less about convincing people that are in hard opposition and more about moving ppl that are pro, soft or uninformed. Then moving those people to take actions that advance the ball in their own interests or the interest of allies. You can really only move people that are hard against when the stakes are low and they have no ideological commitment against what you are suggesting. Getting someone to change ideologically is a slow or impossible process that comes from changes in social position and inner changes.
This isn't true in my experience as a party operator at all. You can easily move MAGA to progressive quite simply, do some deep canvassing but you'll find out that there are more agreements that people care about (healthcare costs, housing costs, poor salaries, poor retirement, decaying society) where you can build on top of.
Also what you're saying goes against the most effective union advice from people like Jane McAlevey that have successfully implemented strikes with >95% participation rates and getting workers effectively everything they ask for. Want to know how she is able to achieve this? She talks to those that people respect and follow in the workplace, often these people are at odds against you.
In her books she has given example after example on how she would convert people that were leading the anti-union efforts into being pro-union joining the cause.
Sorry man, just because your organizational skills are terrible doesn't me that there aren't real effective ways to do this.
Those people weren't ideologically against you on housing, healthcare, or poor salaries etc. If they were, you wouldn't be able to convince them. The reason they were easier to move is because of their class position. If you talked to a business owner, they would be against improving many of those things, particularly poor salaries and retirement. Healthcare keeps employees tied to work too.
With workers, there isn't an economic interest against changing those positions. With a business owner there is. I'm sure you understand this since you are talking about unions. In the taxonomy I described, I would categorize the people you're talking to as "soft" or "uninformed" because you are encouraging them to take action in their own interest.
Organizing still requires access to ground truth information. It's not enough for people to be organized. They do need to be organized around actual good ideas which requires information.
Organizing without journalism is just religious evangelism and mob justice.
No, this still doesn't matter. Just still waste of time of time caring about what journalists think over activating the local community into your cause.
Go read "No Shortcuts" by Jane McAlevey to understand what effective organizing is.
You are presuming that one has a cause and that that cause is correct.
But where does that presumption come from? In order to be worth supporting, a cause does actually need to be based in reality. And you can't get that without journalism.
Should I join a cause that wants to outlaw popsicle sticks? Raise taxes on birdwatchers? Require owners of unicycles to register them? How does someone figure out what's a useful cause without actual information?
There's no point in hearing you because you're still espousing ineffective things. You do you, I know what works because I've been doing it for 5 years. The people that taught me were doing it effectively for 40 years. It's not complicated or hard, you just have to you know... actually organize with the appropriate power players.
I can see why advocacy is appealing to you though because you aren't sacrificing anything and allows oneself to be lazy rather than effective.
This is the entire point and purpose of the public library system: aggregating resources to provide accessible information and entertainment for local communities.
Your local library almost certainly has subscriptions to several online and physical news sources. Typically larger libraries have physical newspaper subscriptions from across the country.
If you want to improve accessibility for everyone while still keeping publishers paid, donate to your local library and tell everyone you know about the services they offer. Seriously, we already have a nationwide system to provide access to information that not everyone can afford. We don't need to invent something new and more complicated.
It’s a nice sentiment (librarianship runs in my family) but there are still issues with accessibility for library institutional subscriptions, compared to easily shared links. Relying on institutional subscriptions for revenue isn’t enough for the publishers and journalists. It’s also hard to target donations towards certain parts of the collection; at most libraries almost none of your donation would go towards periodicals.
None of these problems are unsolvable, but typical libraries would need to significantly change their focus and invest in new shared technology first.
I do recommend contacting circulation, reference or technology direction to share your desire to see the library play a larger role in making journalism accessible to the community.
> I wonder if there is a viable business model where for each article, readers can pay to unlock it not just for themselves, but for everyone.
The thing that best approximates what you're asking for and is likely to work (i.e. doesn't need micropayments) is the "free to read" substacks. Anyone can read them, and anyone can pay to subscribe, and if enough people subscribe so that the authors can make rent, they keep writing.
The hardest part about either one is that it requires altruism and then people are often accosted by insufficiently schooled wannabe intellectuals who tell them that being altruistic is irrational. Meanwhile human beings would otherwise intuitively understand that once your basic needs are met, valuing the common good more than personal consumption of hedonistic luxury products is a perfectly rational thing to do, until someone comes along to lecture them on what they should want and try to make them feel stupid for wanting something better.
> I want the whole populace to be informed, even poor people.
> ...I wonder if there is a viable business model where for each article, readers can pay to unlock it not just for themselves, but for everyone.
Propagation is free; quality journalism is premium.
An interesting idea, nonetheless.
However, in the end, I really don't believe any serious article ever moved the needle of an election. The kind of news that actually make people vote is "(identity) of (skin color) killed (another identity) of (another skin color) brutally," not some analysis over the economical consequence of the cease of Fed independence.
"I will write X. Once I have sold $Y worth of licenses, I'll open source it".
Every purchaser is contributing towards the future state of it being open sourced. It balances the needs of developers to need to live and pay bills vs most us wanting to get our code out there. It breaks the monthly recurring revenue model most customers hate. It incentivises early adopters to "invest" by getting early access, but means uncertain just have to wait.
Doing this with articles, books, music, whatever - all sounds pretty cool to be honest. It requires creators to radically transform their human need to maximise revenue from "hits" though.
I really like this idea for a lot of reasons, but especially the last one. It seems like it creates an incentive model that's much closer to rewarding quality investigative journalism rather than the viral junk that ad-driven business models incentivize.
But there is room for it to go wrong, so it would have to be designed carefully. For example it's still vulnerable to the same rage-bait incentive that ad-driven services are, where people decide that articles that make them angry or afraid, or which make their ideological opponents look evil, are more worth spreading (and therefore more worthy of paying to unlock for the crowds).
There's probably no perfect defence against this, but there's at least one option where the kickstarter contract can be structured so that the payments get returned if the article is later found to be factually incorrect in some major aspect. Then at least there's a pull towards truth, even if it's still rage-inducing.
Of course, this model also incentivizes the writing of articles that groups with more buying power are more likely to want to spread, so the wealthier blocs will shape the narrative... but when has the world ever been otherwise.
What if you did like The Guardian, but writ small, and just suggest how much the article is worth after a person read it. Often when I read something really good I have a bit of a high at the end of it, real gratitude for the writer(s) and others who put it together. I wouldn't mind if that feeling was monetized.
Wouldn't we just be reading what people like Musk would want us to read? Or content that makes either extreme of the political spectrum feel passionate? I fear it would drown out little truths and balanced opinions.
> This would take advantage of human psychology that we like being part of something bigger than ourselves.
> And it would hopefully have the emergent property that news that people feel is actually valuable gets spread more widely than useless junk.
There are at least two additional emergent properties:
1. That would essentially put a ceiling on revenue per article.
2. Articles close to the unlock threshold would be much more likely to get funding, opening huge space for manipulation.
Great point and good idea. Maybe something like the Kickstarter model, where you commit to paying something and it only gets deducted if enough people commit?
You'd probably still want to read it straight away rather than wait so you'd pay a small amount for immediate access and commit an additional amount for public access if the threshold is reached. The public commitment could come at the bottom of the article, once you've decided that it's on the public interest.
Counterpoint, you'v just changed publishing incentives. If I write 10 public interest stories, but notice a particular topic is making me more $$, I'll focus in on that.
You could end up with bad actors/PR management types promoting particular stories constantly or to detract from investigation they want less public.
Thanks. I always like putting my ideas out there as I often get feedback on points I hadn't considered.
On this leading to reporting being pushed more towards what people consider in the public interest, I would argue that's a good thing. It's also maybe not that different to the current status quo if you look at how different TV or news networks cater to one target market or another.
With regards to your second point, sounds like you're essentially describing a Sybil attack. I agree with you that that's a serious concern. I'm just going to think aloud here so not sure where I'll end on this but let's see:
1. Having to make a micropayment for each upvote will at least put some cost to the bad actors, cf spam email vs spam SMS. That still makes it more amenable to abuse by the rich but I guess in the end it would come down to the balance of economic power and interest/participation between the masses and the elites?
2. How does it compare to the current model? You pay for a monthly subscription which in this context is an undifferentiated portfolio bundle of the news stories of a particular month. I guess that does make the cost of a Sybil attack higher because you can't just spend on the particular other stories trending at the same time as the one that you are currently trying to bury. For the good actor consumer this means that they generally have to pay for/support a news organisation that is broadly aligned with their interests or ideology. It does create this cliff effect though in that if I don't think I'll read enough stories in a particular month to justify my subscription then I won't pay for it at all.
3. I guess this mirrors the kind of debate and thought that's been going on in decentralized blockchain and web3 circles over the past decade or more about how to structure incentives that create broad distributions of power without too much concentration. I'm not up to speed on that so would love it if someone more knowledgeable would weigh in.
4. I had a thought about tying subscriptions to real world identities of natural persons but I don't like that from a privacy and censorship perspective.
5. I was reminded of Quadratic Voting (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadratic_voting) which I believe would work well if there is a limited set of participants but I think won't protect you from a Sybil attack when it is cheap to create identities.
6. Building on points 5 and 4, what about this? You need a decentralized digital identity in the form of a DID which would have to be signed by some trusted party, either a government or some other institution. This could still be anonymous or pseudononymous in that when you go to the authority to have it signed, the signing authority checks that you currently don't have another active identity or any previous ones have been revoked (potentially problematic as I'm guessing the authority would have to maintain a link and I don't know if that's possible in a zero knowledge way). Alternatively identities are unlimited but expensive to create, say something like $1000 a piece so that creating 1M fake ones at least costs you $1bn. It's yours for life though so you can amortize the cost over time. In order to not cut out people at the bottom of the income distribution, they can use the government signed one but they lose the benefit of anonimity.
7. Once you have something like 6 then maybe QV is a good mechanism for apportioning micropayments on stories in the public interest?
Anyway, would love to know what current SOTA on this is in web3 circles rather than my speculations over my morning coffee.
> Let's say a journalist writes an excellent article about something political of serious import. I'm fine with paying for that article to get access to it.
Ignoring the millionaire angle of just paying for salaries, we sort of already have that. It's the algorithm of whatever platform a person is on. The net result is people focusing on things that get the most eyeballs.
The problem with your vision is literally what you are saying:
> I'm fine with paying for that article
Sure. But what about the one before that? And the one after that? Articles that don't meet your standards that you would say you are fine paying for.
It's like asking to pay a programmer per line of code that goes into the actual final build.
Unit tests? Nope. Integration tests? Nada. Comments? Nope. Documentation? Are users paying for it? No? No way!
This sounds ridiculous because it is.
And you already work this way. You lump stuff people don't care about with stuff people do care about and combine them.
It's the old joke about paying by the hour vs. by the project, and how you aren't paying for the 15 minutes of work it takes an expert to do something, but for the 20 years of experience that allow them to do it in 15 minutes.
> I wonder if there is a viable business model where for each article, readers can pay to unlock it not just for themselves, but for everyone. The price would obviously have to be higher since you aren't just buying it for yourself. But perhaps the sense of "I'm helping build a better-informed world and helping broadcast my values" would encourage people to pay that higher price.
I think that could work in a way. I think it's a bit more involved than just buying an article.
Back of the comment thinking here: you see an article you like, you buy a year subscription. This signals that sometimes articles take longer to write, that the person writing that article can't write good articles if they are stressed, and that they avoid having to only ever chase trends.
Then, by having that sub, you have votes. These are effectively "tipping" with your subscription. You don't pay more; you just signal that you want this article to be free. If enough people "tip" on this article, it goes free.
Does this work? I don't know. I feel like in this case, it's low enough to be feasible but not too low as to diminish the work. I think people who claim they are willing to pay for the article will show their true colors and balk at the price. Ignoring that the article is more than just the lines of text and the time it took to type it out.
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
The irritating thing to me here is that I actually don't mind the concept of advertising. Mostly it's the implementation. Newspaper ads don't bug me one bit, because they're not physically capable of moving, animating, dancing, and trying to get my attention. They're not physically capable of tracking my habits and reporting them back to the mothership. They're just... there. Passive. Occasionally interesting, or at least pleasantly designed.
If internet advertising was more like newspaper advertising, I wouldn't feel quite so compelled to go out of my way to block it. But no, someone somewhere along the way decided it had to be actively distracting, and track those impressions, and the industry just can't help itself. It's rotten to the core.
They didn't bug me in the 90s but 3 decades of deeply annoying internet ads have kinda made me allergic to them.
I don't think I'll ever stop using an adblocker. Even if ads would become less annoying or if it would become illegal to use an adblocker or something.
The other day I was thinking how pleasant it was to read a newspaper (26 years ago) compared to reading the news online today.
With a newspaper, the paragraph you are currently reading doesn't suddenly jump out of view just because some ad finally loaded or was replaced by a different sized ad. The ads were static and so inoffensive back then, but they still made the newspapers lots of money.
There are downsides to newspapers, of course: they are unwieldy on the train, they kill trees, and they get out-of-date really fast.
If some decent publication could replicate the good parts of a newspaper for a modern tablet device ($0.50 or whatever per issue, the ads are static images and never replaced after the page is loaded, and no jumping content), I think I would pay.
Magazines on the other hand could get annoying, especially with the scratch-n-sniff perfume/cologne ads.
Otherwise, I agree with the bad thing about ads is adTech and not ads themselves. The internet just allowed our worst selves to run rampant with the obvious result coming to fruition.
I don't know, man, glossy magazine ads were glamorous. sure there was stupid stuff, but the comparison between the "one weird trick" era and magazine ads of someone looking cool so you have a positive impression with some brand name is pretty stark.
But do you think the concept of advertising is the best solution to the problem it tries to solve? I have serious doubts.
Sure, 100 years ago you had no other way to make something known, but today with everybody having a smartphone there might be other ways. I always would like to see reviews of stuff from my immediate network of friends (or, let's say 2-3 connections) - wouldn't that be much better? Of course, the whole ad industry will have zero interest to promote something like this, where they loose control and the process might be actually efficient.
Sorta depends on how you define the concept. A sign on the side of a storefront is definitely marketing. If I walk into a department store, every product on the shelf is wrapped in advertising, from its packaging to the brand name to the picture of what the product is for. When I visit Amazon, and start searching for something to buy, every single thing that comes up could be thought of as an ad for itself, since otherwise I wouldn't be able to find it in the first place.
These are contextually relevant ads. Of course they are, right? The task is buying stuff. That's the time, and the place. The best time, really. My wallet is out and I'm ready to go with the purchase.
If it's a little hard for me to discover that a product exists, so that I know to seek it out, I think that's okay. We could do with more curation and less firehose-of-attention in that department. Needing to coordinate those sponsorships ahead of time should act as a stronger filter. The newspaper knowing which ad it is running alongside today's article might not have been such a bad idea. The ones that cheapen out and print nonsense damage their reputation in the process, right?
Why would ads go away just because you pay? Print newspapers and magazines have had ads forever and they cost money. Even expensive glossy magazines like National Geographic have full page ads, half page ads, etc.
There is no natural law that ads will go away. Ads will only disappear if their presence would make the company lose more customers than they gain on ads. Ads make them money. If people don't mind it so much to abandon the service/website, there will be ads. Publications are businesses and want to maximize profits. They don't just want to cover some fixed ongoing costs, like hosting and journalist salaries. As a business they use the available tools to make more profits. There is no "enough" in business.
Exactly, we see this play out clearly with streaming apps. Disney sells a subscription to remove ads, then one day they change their mind and now you only see “less ads” and they introduce an even more expensive plan that removes ads. The behavior should be criminal yet every major streaming app does this.
These companies like to pretend ads are the pro-consumer approach when in reality they’d much rather scale through advertising than anything else. They get to increase revenue without touching acquisition cost. The only loser is the poor chump trying to watch their favorite TV show.
Pay for the service.
Then pay more to remove ads.
But then a massive amount of their catalog remains “only with ads.”
And then they pack half the usable screen with media that must be bought and titles that require add-on subscriptions.
It’s a real cesspool.
Hulu does a lot of this garbage too, but not quite as obnoxiously.
I feel like the less tolerance I have for ads (as time goes on), the more desperate they get in trying increasingly aggressive ways of making you watch ads. I'm never watching ads again, ever! I'm willing to pay, but not with my time for your terrible, horrendous, bullshit ads!
True, but also, businesses have used "coupons" for a long time. I saw one article where this was described as "selling the same product at multiple tiers".
eg. if you're rich, you don't bother with coupons (in general) - your time is more valuable than clipping the coupon and remembering to take it. if you're middle class, you use the coupon to feel like you're getting a deal, but if you forget, oh well. if you're lower class, you wait for a sale and then use the coupon to be able to afford it at all.
Similar with ads - if you won't let me access your site without showing me ads (even with an adblocker) - I really don't need your product that badly. Sell to those who have a lot of spare attention or willpower to look past your ads.
I don't mean I click on ads - EVER - but they're distracting. VERY distracting. I mean, the few times I've had to use yahoo mail from a browser without an ad blocker, it was an unbelievably bad experience. (yes, I still use yahoo. I got at least one of those accounts right around the time "BackRub" was renamed "Google")
When people are trying to justify ads, they often lean on "our servers cost $X per month and we have Y journalists paid $Z per month, therefore we need revenue from ads" which makes it sound like they need to raise a fixed, finite amount.
That sounds much more persuasive than "our billionaire owner paid a lot of money for this for-profit business, and he'd really like a return on his investment"
But you're right, of course - the fact someone pays a lot of money for something doesn't mean it won't be plastered with tawdry ads.
I don't mind sponsored ads that are mostly static inside the video or text. Also if creators accept sponsors that are too bad their reputation might be affected.
The only thing that can be in some cases it's influencing the content and the creator not providing genuine content because conflict of interest
A particular aspect of the discussion is also: What makes you trust that once micropayments are around ads will stop? Look at other services, like Netflix for example. They will happily have you pay and show you ads if they feel they can get away with it.
I am not at all against paying for journalism (I already do in many ways), but IMO, it would be best if there was a way to pay money to one place and then have it go to all journalistic media that deserves that name and has a track record of not being factually wrong multiple times per day.
Thinking about how journalism ought to be payed in this day and age also means to think about what kind of journalism we want to incentivise and which one we want to disincentivise. What we need is the kind that is factually correct and a check to the most wealthy and powerful people, organisations, companies and countries on earth. What we don't need is the kind that is captured by exactly those people, the kind that bends reality to stoke the lowest impulses etc.
With this in mind, we should think about how to design a incentive structure that makes that result benefitial, while all others are unsupported.
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.
Well, people legitimately hated banner ads and pop-ups. When I get linked to some small news publisher I'm often reading the article between these giant ads, sometimes I don't realize there's actually more content to an article because the ads take up so much space! I typically close those sites out and try to find what I'm looking for elsewhere.
I think that most people don't really care about tracking, but the fact that often ads make their experience miserable.
You open a link, you get a full screen ad, and have to wait 10 seconds or more. When you finally can close the ad, a popup appears asking if you want to subscribe to their newsletter. you close that too. A cookie banner reminds you that they care about your privacy, that's why they share your details with 1000+ partners. When you find the hidden button to say that you don't accept finally the article appears, but the bottom half is occupied by an overlay with a video ad. All the while the page scrolls terribly because of the amount of javascript loaded.
Or, sometimes, you get ad, cookie banner and then they tell you that you have to pay to access the content.
I suspect that if people had to choose between ads without tracking and tracking without the ads, they would choose the latter.
This is exactly my problem with ads. They've turned into a spying mechanism that eats my battery, bandwidth, and privacy. Not only do the ad platforms want to track me but then sell their data to an innumerate number of "partners". I have no control or influence over how any of the data is used. I also have no meaningful way to opt out.
Clicking a link on the web is not tacit permission to endlessly surveil me. Viewing a blog post is not informed consent to be tracked. Even a cookie banner isn't informed consent.
While I never enjoyed magazine or television ads I never minded them. Some were even useful and introduced me to a product I ended up wanting/needing. They also didn't track me all over the web. I don't mind ads, I do mind surveillance.
For a few years in the webcomic & blog space there was Ryan North's Project Wonderful, which served unintrusive auctioned banner ads that were usually advertising another creator's genuinely interesting work; I have no problem at all seeing ads for things sincerely made by humans.
Mozilla tried this. But the only people who want this is consumers. Advertisers want as much info as possible to target ads so would never choose this option unless heavily pressured by consumers.
Founder of EthicalAds here. In my view, this is only partially true and publishers (sites that show ads) have choices here but their power is dispersed. Advertisers will run advertising as long as it works and they will pay an amount commensurate with how well it works. If a publisher chooses to run ads without tracking, whether that's a network like ours or just buyout-the-site-this-month sponsorships, they have options as long as their audience generates value for advertisers.
That said, we 100% don't land some advertisers when they learn they can't run 3rd party tracking or even 3rd party verification.
My favorite forum has ads on every page. One header and one footer. Text only as a link to the site or product being advertised. The advertisers pay the site owner himself.
I've bought things from those ads because they're targeting the demographic on that site, not targeting me specifically. They're actually more relevant.
Now that's not probably sustainable, but I have to imagine that the roi for the advertisers is higher than general targeted ads. I've never even clicked on one of those except by accident.
I don't understand why more companies don't do contextual ads, yeah. Why track users all around the web when you can go to a website about cars and put in car ads, or a website about music and sell concert tickets or etc? You already know everyone on that website is interested in the topic, and the analytics would be much cheaper this way.
They absolutely do. Every sponsorship you see on a podcast or a youtube video or a streamer is a contextual ad. Many open source sponsorships are actually a form of marketing. You could argue that search ads are pretty contextual although there's more at work there. Every ad in a physical magazine is a contextual ad. Physical billboards take into account a lot of geographical context: the ads you see driving in LA are very different than the ones you see in the Bay Area. Ads on platforms like Amazon, HomeDepot, etc. are highly contextual and based on search terms.
Should people expect high quality journalism if revenue is based on the number of views?
Good journalism costs money, people should expect to pay.
Though I'd point out that publishing news is now cheaper than ever, and people were more than willing to pay for access before, so why shouldn't they be willing to pay less now?
Or perhaps more to the point, why are they _not_ willing to pay now? And is the reason something ad-based perhaps?
I interpreted your original post to mean that you found none of micropayments, ads or subscriptions to be acceptable. Now I have the impression that I misinterpreted you -- but I still can't tell what kind(s) of payment you would actually find acceptable.
What kind(s) of payment would you find acceptable?
My preference would be free, single payment, subscription. Probably in that order.
I don't mind micropayments as a _method_ to achieve any of those, but I don't like them as a replacement for ads. And I don't accept the premise that ads should be replaced with something similar.
Thanks. By "single payment", do you mean one payment for lifetime access? I'm aware of a personal cloud storage provider that offers this, but I don't think it could work for news.
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!
Demanding your friends engage in a financial transaction with a third party is a different vibe. The reality of what would actually happen is this: if I can’t read it, I can’t read it. If I ask and they’re willing to provide it, then I’ll read it, and I would do the same with them.
But the truth is, that would grate on people, and not just with me and mine, but for everyone if we all had to engage in financial transactions to read the links that are shared with us or posted on the web. So people would just stop sharing links. I’d think twice before sending someone a link, and others would as well. We’d probably just swap to copying the whole article in another form and sharing that instead, but the extra steps would reduce the amount we would be willing to share over time cuz trading PDFs we have to generate ourselves is not as much fun as trading links.
What if the sender covered the micro transaction on the behalf of the receiver? People might be more inclined to send what they see as micro-gifts, rather than micro-obligations.
Are you assuming the current landscape where engaging in a financial transaction, even if only for $0.01, is a tedious and unquantifiably dangerous gambit? (Sale of your info, leaking of your info, dark pattern subscription TOS's, etc.)
Or would you still hold your opinions even in a theoretical landscape where paying $0.01 is just consenting to that amount being deducted from your bank account, with no friction or danger?
If I could EASILY click "yes" to say, pay $0.01 from a pre-filled anonymous wallet that I have to manually refill (say, in $10 increments) and there's no way to hack payment information in any way, OR to figure out what info I've paid for, that would help a LOT.
Of course, they would probably have to accept visa gift cards paid for in cash for this to actually be truly anonymous. I mean sure, I have nothing nefarious to hide - but who is to say what the current administration will decide is nefarious tomorrow? Reading too many NY Times articles, and not enough National Review articles? "You are in violation of the internet news fairness doctrine"...
Indeed this is what I was getting at. I think you're far from the only one whose market behavior would change given such technology.
This is somewhat ironic to me, given that I normally despise everything about fintech. But this seems like a product/practice that could actually change the world for the better. The closest we have is crypto wallets and that's far from perfect.
Then I don't understand the bitter line in the sand you've drawn between $0.00 and $0.0001. You could spend a whole lifetime paying this latter amount multiple times per day, and it would cost you about as much as a box of bandaids.
If you really value the information contained in these articles at $0.00, then neither would you spend that much more valuable resource—time—in order to digest it, even if it were given to you for free.
So I don't think you're hung up about the actual financial cost in this analysis. You're either like most people, who simply don't want to deal with the rigmarole of patiently providing payment info to a hundred different vendors who will act irresponsibly with your data, or you have some purely symbolic and emotional connection to the notion that you're providing exactly zero dollars and zero cents to your enemies.
The vast majority of the time that I read the news, it’s from a publication I pay for. They get far far more than a box of bandaids over a lifetime.
The rest can be worth my time, sometimes, under limited circumstances, but usually it isn’t. Like who here can say that all of the links they’ve clicked on throughout their lifetime have been valuable, and haven’t just been time wasters?
If you put a financial cost on links though, people just won’t pay. And they won’t click links. We might waste less time too, but just because something got my time doesn’t mean I’m going to also give it money for having had the privilege of my time.
> Like who here can say that all of the links they’ve clicked on throughout their lifetime have been valuable, and haven’t just been time wasters?
Certainly many of them are time wasters! But before you've clicked on these links, I should think they are best modeled as a random variable payout (P) as measured against the monetary (M) and temporal (T) cost of clicking and reading through them. If the expected value calculation doesn't work out (E(P) < E(M) + E(T)), this is when I say nope and don't click. If it does work out, then it works out in such a way that there is at least some very small micropayment value ε > 0 that I would (in a ideal and frictionless environment) also be willing to endure on top of the temporal cost.
What most "free" content providers decided to converge on in order to extract epsilons from consumers so that they can continue to do business is ads, rather than honest micropayments.
I would be fine with most businesses that rely on ad revenue burning to the ground. And there are a few businesses that I will go far out of my way to patronize with more-than-a-box-of-bandaids. But for the majority of the free content providers that are not steaming garbage, but are also not in the privileged group of content providers that I deeply approve of and consciously think about, then in a frictionless environment I think I would prefer that they survive off rationally priced micropayments rather than be forced into the ad circus.
> rationally priced micropayments rather than be forced into the ad circus
And when the rational price is zero, or rounds down to zero, they won’t survive either way, even with the magic fintech of your fantasies.
If something is worth paying for, then pay for it. People don’t want to pay because the real value of most news to them is actually just $0.00. Making the fraction of a penny small enough while somehow dodging all the middlemen that want their cut might get a few charitable folks on board, but it won’t replace ads, subscriptions, or anything else a news org can do to sustain its business model. It’s not about how small and frictionless you can make the cost to potentially charitable individuals, it’s about convincing them that it is worth doing at all when they already either pay nothing because it’s worth nothing to them or pay a lot because it’s worth a lot to them. The middle ground is where ads and free newsletters live.
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.
I wouldn't pay .000001 cents either. If they did charge this way the amount of generated clickbait titles would surpass anything we've seen before. At least now they have to backup the clickbait title with content that causes you to stay longer for more ads with micropayments they already took your money.
New micro payment scheme that charges .000001 cents every time you page down. Like the old listicles that make you click into a new page for every number, but instead you have your credit card tied to your scroll wheel.
They didn't change most people's life, though, and/or most people's lives were changed by other articles. Publishers cannot meaningfully price-discriminate on this basis. The closest version is republishing a longer version as a book.
So, consumers are left with some amount of surplus. The horror.
Completely disagree that news is already priced appropriately for the value it delivers to people. I dont pay for the news I read because its not valued at $10 a month for me but I still do value it. For me $2 a month is what i value it but since they dont offer that as an option I cant pay. If you're to broke to click on a link because it might cost 0.0001 cent just say so. Maybe your friends can give you a cent so you can read news for the rest of your days.
Most people are not paying per call or paying anything. If the goal is to reduce half a million readers to a core group of thousands who will pay then this idea might work.
This is me w Google Gemini. And you're right: it does change your outlook on micropayments, which in my case, are API calls. My costs for the last few days: 3 cents, 2 cents, 46 cents. Believe it or not, every one of those calls was scrutinized and justified.
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.
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?
The solution is called centralization by a middle man that takes a massive cut - eg YouTube Premium. Only Google makes real money off that, and the content creators rely on sponsors instead for their own revenue. So does it really work? I would despise a future where we solve micro transactions by giving up control to yet-another unnecessary body. Especially not even at the level of Visa or Mastercard, despite how much I dislike crypto.
No, that is absolutely 100% not micropayments, as the consumer is not paying per view/article/video whatever. They're paying a fixed fee and are not metered.
Good to know. Now I think I know why micropayments for news media never took off: because people who want to read news media probably don't want to waste mental cycles on keeping track of a micropayments account. They want a set-and-forget solution with a predictable cost. If micropayments can't fit those expectations, then the market probably wants something other than the thing we're calling micropayments.
Goes like the following:
Google/YouTube have a userbase to track accounts for; they go to a bank (licensed money transmitter, with OFAC/KYC/AML programs implemented). Google gets paid by people looking to advertise, and that money goes into Google's master account. Google's finance system translates views/impressions to money movements to creator accounts hosted at other banks (same deal, OFAC/KYC/AML program in place). The main thing is, every party that actually moves around money, operates in such a way that the entire transaction chain is followable. It's not point to point, it's hub and spoke. The hubs keep track of everything to keep the Osama Bin Laden's or Russian Oligarch's, or Cuban nationals out of the U.S. financial system.
"Micropayments" have always been something different. We technologists just figured there would be a way we could whip up some accounting software, or a spec, and allow people a way to store and transact without relying on a custodial holder, with all the extra regulation burden. Point is though, government and law enforcement don't want that, because with that, it becomes a great deal more difficult to follow the money, or to get away with things like mandating everyone report money movements over some amount to the tax authority; something easy to do when it's tacked on to the condition of maintaining your license to do business. Every money transmitter being well behaved and integrated with the state maximizes the risk for anyone attempting to utilize the financial system for illegal activity.
Ergo... What you think of as already solved isn't "micropayments". It's traditional finance in the U.S. What we refer to when we say Micropayments, is a way to store value, maintain accounts, and run point to point transactions "blessed" or recognized by the world et al without an intermediary.
Nope! That's the fun part! All the misery from the downsides, none of the upside! But imagine how much worse it could be! /s
There's a reason I'm doing anything possible to avoid going back into finance. I never developed the knack to just sit back quietly doing stupid things that don't work for the purpose everyone says it's for.
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).
That's called starting a bank, or financial services company, and lots of places do it, but the bar to do so, and remain able to do so is fairly high. The margins, however, are exquisite. The middlemen eat fat off the percent they skim off the top.
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!)
As mentioned above, it's not a micropayment. It's just a payment. You can transact in whatever amounts you want, and backend systems will bump the numbers around just fine, even for fractions of a cent. Hell, that's how interest and currency exchange settle out. The LLM provider runs a meter. The meter tallies your activity, wraps it in a transaction, hands it to the backend, backend talks to other banks/payment gateways, an ACH happens, done. That isn't a "micropayment". That's just a payment. In fact, if you pay attention, some of the biggest winners in tech, namely cloud providers or AI providers, are as darling as they are because they figured out how to turn everyday compute tasks into billable transactions. We're exceptionally good at tracking the build up of value, even if your atomic unit of transaction is a thousandth of a cent, but x however many million customers you have, it quickly adds up.
Micropayments have always, as long as I've been in the industry, implied a level of disintermediation on the behalf of sender/receiver. The chance to have that kind of utility died September 11th, 2001, when the U.S. and western world suddenly got the bright idea that the only way to protect themselves from terrorists was to modify the system to be able to surveil everybody l, all at once. Bringing us to a codger explaining why P2P micropayments are pretty much a pipedream in the finance world as she is legally practiced.
Not too interested in debating the semantics of "micropayment", but it sounds like if we swap in "news sites" in place of "LLM providers" everything should still still be possible? Consumers could pay tiny amounts of money for individual articles?
You already can with traditional finance. The only thing stopping that from being the case is that the news orgs don't want to sell their product that way, and you can't force them to. That's kind of a them thing. They get to dictate their terms, you don't like them, that's fine. Their answer would be you aren't their target demographic. Besides which, do you really want to create an arrangement by which someone sneaking in an XSS driven script will drive your browser to visit their entire catalog, and piping the content to /dev/null or similar, you getting charged for every GET?
The technical possibility is there. The desire to operate the business that way is not. You're a victim of the conspicuously absent feature implementation, and all I can say is... Well... Welcome to the club. Here's your "Fuck MBAs" hat, and an Occupy Wall Street T-Shirt, because the perpetrators inflicting your suffering all pretty much as a whole wear suits.
Well, there's OFAC, for one. In the U.S. alphabet soup, that's the Office of Foreign Asset Control, and they maintain the master sanctions list operated by the Federal government. This is a list, that as a matter of law, must be checked against every transaction. If there is a match on the receiving end of funds to a sanctioned individual, the transaction is immediately halted. If a sanctioned party is the originator, a flag may be raised for the institution to deal with otherwise. You do not want to end up on that list, because if you do, the U.S. financial system turns into a roach motel. Assets flow into the custodianship of the service provider, but are unable to move out. A very highly controversial feature to have implemented if I dare say so myself. Then there are the SAR's and CTR's, which are reports that must be filed by banks in the event of "suspicious activity". I.e. structuring, withdrawal of large amounts of cash, etc. They are specifically prohibited from informing you as a customer about these processes.
Then there's the risk department integration. It is mandatory to hand over transaction information on request by law enforcement. The process is mandatory, and continued licensure is conditional on maintaining a program through which financial surveillance can be conducted by the State.
Now, are these features inherently bad? No. Not at first blush. Do they have the potential to become horrifying? Well... Look at what happened to the ICC judge who got added to the sanctioned entities list. It doesn't just effect bank accounts. It involves anything that you engage in a digital transaction to maintain access to. That means entire sectors suddenly go from situation normal, to persona non grata, your business is not welcome here, at threat of massive fines for doing business with a sanctioned entity.
I went into finance looking for a boring, uncontroversial line of work, and came out after a few years realizing the entire sector is so damn wired for power projection it's not even funny. Once you see it and understand how the bounds of what you can do are constrained by these people who are authorized to digitally transact on your behalf... Well... It can't really be unseen.
Thanks. As someone who has lived in 3 countries (2 as an adult) and is considering leaving the US again.. Any hints on how NOT to end up on that list? I.e. avoid large transfers? What's the best way to transfer some $$ out of the US? I have no red flags in my background other than some speeding tickets 10+ years ago and have dual citizenship.
How far does this extend? I read the ICC judge had her credit cards canceled - which would be bad, but, has she been prevented from just going to her bank / withdrawing funds / writing a cheque to pay for her bills? Which western countries are more / less integrated into this?
Don't want to end up on the Sanctioned Entity List? Avoid anything that might make you controversial to a Federal Bureaucrat, and never do business with or on behalf of anyone already on the list. That's pretty much the only criteria to get on it. It's considered to be under the auspices of "Foreign Policy" so is under the sole discretion of the Federal Executive.
A few years ago, I'd tell you if it's a NATO ally, odds are at some point they are wired into OFAC. The choice is, do business with the American financial system, or get added to the sanctioned. There's a reason why I said the American Financial system is wired for soft power projection. We were big and trustworthy enough where just going along with it to maintain access to things made the act of checking a list that thusfar, no one had too many objections to the people who ended up getting added to it was just a no brainer.
Then... an ICC judge got sanctioned, finally making apparent how the U.S. really intended the mechanism to be used; as an "our way, or the highway" sort of thing. So I'm far from able to make any informed guesses on who is still honoring the commitment or not. The Cheeto-in-Chief has done a marvelous job at encouraging everyone to reassess the longevity or reliability of Pax Americana, sooo...
As for how to move assets out? If you aren't on the list, just move em somewhere else. Just not to anywhere on the list. If you are on the list, kiss your assets custodially held goodbye til the ole' U.S. of A decides to take you off the list, which at a minimum is probably going to require some very uncomfortable chats with people you don't want to be alone with.
Again, there is a reason I left. There is a reason I have no desire to return, and why I've basically opted to live life extra hard mode, because I can't just accept that it's okay for the Government to orchestrate financial lockout; and even less reason why we should all be gungho to implement systems like that. Canada has one, I'm pretty sure Great Britain and most of Europe each probably maintain their own as well. You'd have to check. I understand why a country would seek to have one, and operate one. I just can't consciably be involved in it. The abuse potential of the capability is too damn high. "Good guys in office who wouldn't be stupid enough to abuse such a thing" cannot be said to be a given. I wasn't comfortable with the Orange Man sitting on the nuclear football, nor am I comfortable with him on OFAC or anything else his position now entitles him too.
If I sound like a paranoid nutter, I sympathize, sounds pretty fantastic right? I once thought the same thing about a guy who used to work for the Postal Service who tried to tell me that "Oh, hell no, USPS will absolutely open main in transit for a myriad of reasons. At the time, I took it with a grain of salt. Now... I realize he was absolutely telling the truth. If it's a network, we (the U.S.) will do everything in our power to maintain the ability to tap, manipulate, and control it. I just want help machines move bits from A to B man. Not be a cog in sovereign theft/freezing of assets of the politically/diplomatically inconvenient/disfavored. Violates the Moral Imperative.
Using a public ledger, that is just surveilled and treated as prosecution futures, or targeting for kidnappers. Yes, we know. It's also got major usability issues, and tends to end up in practice defaulting to a centralized custodial model anyways for the vast majority of users. Where it can't, the onramps to convert to the currency of the land are outlawed.
I think a token system where $10 gets you 1,000 tokens and each read is logged and costs 1-5 tokens, depending on severity of the news and its age, is a great idea.
Who determines severity? What about investigations that take months or years to produce, who counts how many more tokens they should cost compared with a news story about Trump's latest tweet? Do you get a popup asking if you want to pay x tokens for each link?
Journalism micropayments have been tried many times before, and never worked. Things haven't substantially changed in the meantime, so what would be different this time? I'm genuinely curious, I'm a journalist, so I'd really love to find a working funding model for quality media.
Readers who payed (and only those) could vote on a scale whether the article was worth the payment? The amount payed might even be calculated into the vote, e.g. you payed one token and get one vote, I payed two or three tokens and get two votes.
And for those long investigation stories, you can sell the series cheaper up front and give access to all the stories related to that case. Or nickel and dime each post.
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.
The in-world items you could buy in Second Life two decades ago using Linden dollars were arguably a successful use case for micropayments.
You could buy and sell virtual items with a real-world cost far smaller than the transaction fees of a regular card transaction.
Speaking of which - that, to my mind, is the definition of a micropayment - a payment too small to be practical to administer using existing card payment infrastructure. So-called "micropayments" in games have long since ceased to qualify under that definition - they're just "transactions" now.
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.
I would love the option for pay for usage for many products I am forced into paying a subscription for.
I think one legitimate difficulty with micropayments for a news site (that has a few options to solve) is the reservation price of most readers for a single article might be lower than the cost of handling the transaction. The best option I can think of is the user needs to add credit their account or a credit card or something, which isn’t uncommon but I think some people might see it as a grift where they pay for more than they’re initially getting.
I think one benefit of it or shortcomings is it’ll probably kill off portions with smaller readership, but if that’s not you -you’re no longer paying for something you weren’t reading.
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.
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.
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).
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.
"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 find it hard to take this objection seriously, since almost everything that isn't a physical commodity has some degree of "I don't know if I'm satisfied with this yet". Books and movies clearly do. But we expect to take a risk and occasionally pay for them, and it feels ordinary to do so -- so why not here?
I don't object at all to people not liking micropayments -- I don't like them either. But the reason I don't like them is because I'm accustomed to getting good quality content for free, and no other reason.
With books, movies, tv shows, music almost everyone is discovering based on recommendations or curation. Very few people are consuming much of that type of content with no outside input on its quality or interest. News is almost always a blind link with just a headline to work from.
The headline is a pretty big clue about what's going to be in the article, I think. (Though maybe headlines will become more coy, to entice readers to pay for the full article? We already see this with questions-as-headlines.)
Most of the news I read comes from the same handful of familiar sites, so I have a good idea of what I'm going to get, especially if they include an author byline and I recognise it. "Niche" news sites would do well to continue offering a small number of freebie articles to entice those who chafe at the thought of spending $0.40 on something they're Not Completely Certain Is Really Worth It.
It's a clue of what its about but it's not the same as a recommendation that its going to contain something you enjoy.
So every click is a decision on an unknown and that's where the problem comes in. You read the headline now you have a decision to make, is it worth spending money to continue. For longer form media your return on good stuff is going to be at least an hour of entertainment. For news you will almost certainly be done the article in 30 seconds on less. So you decide to click, you read the article, it's good, it's now 30 seconds later and you read the next headline and you have another decision to make, do I pay for this? Thats where the decision fatigue comes in and why it's so quick with this model. Even if it's just a penny you're not thinking well clicking this will only cost a penny, you're thinking do I really want to pay to see what the other side says?
And if you're at the point where you're spending a lot of time on a single source even if it costs more it generally makes more sense just to subscribe since then you are making a single decision once a month.
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.
It isn't with news though. I am a bit of a news junkie and have actually subscribed to multiple news sources over the past year and I can't name a single journalist from any of them and I am almost certainly average in that way.
absolutely, the problem of the cognitive friction of having to decide what to pay for compounds massively when there uncertainty about the purchase, and the negative experience when the user feels that he or she has been essentially scammed because the purchased product is not what was expected far outweighs positive experiences that are perceived at best as just the expected transaction
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.
With a movie rental I'm paying $5-30 for a 1-2 hour experience where I have some idea going in of what I'm getting thanks to trailers and I'm making that decision maybe once a fortnight if that.
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".
How do you explain public utilities? No one has any issue with the fact that flicking a light switch in your home is technically a micropayment, as it consumes extra electricity that comes out in your monthly bill.
I would venture to say that what consumers don't like about micropayments is any combination of the following:
(1) It's a pain in the ass to provide payment info most places, and comes with the looming paranoia that your data is going to be abused;
(2) It's viscerally disgusting when e.g. AAA video game developers expect you not to notice the difference between $100 for marginal extra content, and 100 micropayment charges of $1 for the same amount of marginal extra content;
(3) It's an infohazard to the average person to inform them exactly how much they're spending on each thing in their life, because it tempts them toward a culturally validated budgetary anorexia.
Public utilities avoid (1) because it's a one-time signup with trusted vendors for years of service, they avoid (2) because utilities are priced (somewhat) rationally in nationally standardized ways, and they avoid (3) because utility bills can only get so itemized.
It's also the incentive structure that's different. E.g. I can choose to buy cheaper LED lights to reduce my electricity costs because the interests of lightbulb companies are mostly orthogonal to the (usage-based) interests of the utility providers.
Micro-payments are more akin to a hypothetical world in which the lightbulb company gets paid via my electricity bill; now they have an incentive to sell incandescents over LEDs. Similar to how micro-payment (and advertising) based news companies have an incentive to sell click-bait, because they're getting paid based on usage rather than a flat fee.
This seems like a problem of perverse incentives independent of the medium of micropayment (cash vs. ad farming), no? I suppose the only way around that particular problem would be to decouple their revenue from the number of people actually accessing their content, which as far as I can tell precludes those people being the patrons. Instead the patron would be some larger corporate or public body auditing and funding them based on merit.
Curiously, there are still perverse incentives even in the case of lightbulbs and other consumable goods or technologies: planned obsolescence, delay of technology upgrades, and deliberate backroom deals from associated resource providers.
Yes! You can partially decouple it through recurring subscriptions, or possibly bundling, such as cable TV. But I can't think of a viable micro-payment method that wouldn't have the same problem.
Planned obsolescence is a failure mode because unit consumption (vs metered consumption) is the monetization scheme. Hypothetically this could be decoupled through something like lifetime warranties, but that has too many failure modes to be broadly viable.
The point is, despite other perverse incentives, with lightbulbs you have a situation in which unit consumption and metered consumption are at odds, so one company can make more money by enabling the customer to spend less elsewhere. Of course, if you ever tie the two together, such that one company profits from metered consumption and controls/profits from the unit -- Inkjet printers with proprietary cartridges come to mind -- you've now adopted an anti-consumer business model.
It's ideal when corporate incentives end up opposed to each other for the benefit of the consumer, but I think you'll be hard pressed to create that through micro-payments.
Is usage based billing the same as micropayments? In any case, I have one utility company with lines connected to my house, so I put up with whatever they want to bill me. Very different marketplace than news papers.
> I have one utility company with lines connected to my house, so I put up with whatever they want to bill me. Very different marketplace than news papers.
Fair point. I suppose I'm considering the alternative scenario where rather than near-monopoly between utility providers in any given region, there is instead room for competition. I claim that even given such competition, those utility providers who offered usage-based billing would be at least as appealing to the public as flat-fee, usage-independent billing.
> Is usage based billing the same as micropayments?
Technically, I suppose you're paying for a resource which you are then allowed to use as you please. But since the average consumer doesn't have access to huge batteries or water reservoirs in their garage, and since utilities companies don't/can't price you differently per watt or gallon or water depending on which appliance you're using, the effect is identical as if utilities companies were instituting rationally (per unit of resource consumed) priced micropayments on each of your household appliances.
For utilities its tolerated because there is a massive difference in cost between servicing different users of different usage patterns. There is no way to have a fixed monthly bill for utilities in a way that is fair. If usage didn't incur such huge costs it would be a fixed bill like internet and phone plans.
While providing extra TV channels costs nothing. Even if you are a power user who watches 10x the TV as a normal person, it doesn't cost the company anything extra.
And also that many of the channels people were insisting they don't want were actually paying for coverage, not charging for it. (Home shopping, religion, etc)
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 thought Spotify's model is all subscriptions go into one pool that gets divided by platform wide listen time.
EDIT: this is indeed the Spotify model while youtuve's approach was to treat premium as a make up for missinflg ad watches so pays out from the individual viewers subscription.
>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...
Blendle [1] had this model for a while but shut it down a couple years ago. It was nice to have to option to buy individual articles from publications that I enjoy reading occasionally but not enough to subscribe.
Washington Post tried cheap "day pass" subscriptions and they didn't really work.
Publishers already relying on subscription revenue need to be careful: some portion of the people already paying $20/mo could save a lot by switching to $1/article.
Newsrooms also hate that approach because of the incentive structure. A lot of the most important stories aren't the ones people want to spend $1 to read.
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
No bundling model is going to work with the papers worth reading, with high-value ones. Look at that list: no FT, only partial WSJ, no Bloomberg (only Businessweek), no Economist, no NYT, no Foreign Affairs, no SCMP. I guess Foreign Policy and Puck bundled could be cool but most "high-value" publications are excluded. This is like netflix where it's never worth subscribing because it's ten thousand things you don't care to watch.
> No bundling model is going to work with the papers worth reading, with high-value ones.
The "high-value" ones don't need to bother with micro-transactions either. They can tell everyone to kick rocks or pay for their subscription -- because they already have a large well-established market of people that consider them high-value enough to pay their subscription fee.
On the other hand, many of the regional ones (for me) like the Houston Chronicle, The Dallas Morning News, Austin American-Statesman and sometimes the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and Los Angeles Times are not in the same position to do that. That doesn't make them not "high-value". Maybe they could get away with micro-transactions but instead of having to manage that they can sign up with services like Apple News+ and focus on the value they bring, regional news.
It's also subjective as to whether or not the other ones included are "worth reading". I personally enjoy quite a few listed in the Science & Tech section, but don't read them enough to pay for individual subscriptions, or deal with micro-payments that I have forgotten about a month later when the statement arrives.
There may be a space for these "high-value" publications to get together and form their own bundle, if they were so inclined
>Apple News+ is ~$13 The list of publications included
Fyi... Apple News+ subscribers don't get the full subscription to all the participating publications. This means a subset of articles and/or partial articles (teasers) that require extra payment to get past a paywall to read the rest of the story. This surprises some people.
People seem to be complaining that they can’t access Washington Post articles, but in 2024, when that thread was written, The Washington Post was not included in Apple News Plus. It joined in 2025 (https://9to5mac.com/2025/09/29/apple-news-just-added-the-was...).
What you could do before that was register your Washington Post subscription, if you had one, with the Apple News app, then you’d be able to read full Washington Post articles - perhaps this was confusing the forum posters?
Apple News+ has tried this. If anyone could pull it off, it's Apple.
But the problem is, it's not comprehensive enough. The two major newspapers/magazines I read aren't on there, because they've got enough market power to require their own subscriptions. Meanwhile, this is similarly missing the long tail of a lot of links I follow that are paywalled.
And then of course there are the massive usability issues. If I see a link on HN to e.g. Forbes, and click it, I just get the paywall. Apple News+ doesn't work in the browser. I understand that sometimes it's possible to use Share... in the browser to send an article to Apple News+, but that seems to require knowing it's one of the included 300+ publications? Which nobody's going to memorize...
I think there's some digital equivalent of the old "pay 25 cents for a newspaper" model buried in the discussion somewhere.
If I had a quick, anonymous way to pay a site 5 cents to read an article, or a dollar to read all the articles I want for some time period, or something to that effect, I'd happily pay that from time to time. What I don't want is a million subscriptions I have to pay 3 or 4 dollars a month for, when I don't read any individual site often enough for that to make sense.
And I definitely don't want them to model the system after fucking video game transactions. The fact that the author mentions the buying it in game currency as something to base this on blew my mind.
>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.
In reality every article worth reading is available for free, using certain urls. So I’m not so much refusing to pay for url access as much as I am deciding to pay for publication and app access.
> That model is completely counter-intuitive and punitive to the consumer.
It's really not, as evidenced by the fact that paying for what you use is how almost every physical good works, and many professional services (a lawyer's time).
It's fine for you to dislike the model -- I dislike it too. I don't like that it makes me anxious about consuming the next small unit of <whatever>. But there's nothing inherently counterintuitive or punitive about it. It's the simplest and most defensible payment model possible.
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.
> 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.
Why not? The only argument I see here is that you have strong feelings.
People are very accustomed to paying for each thing they buy - that how we acquire almost everything. It may be "punitive" in some sense but it's fundamental to every marketplace.
iTunes thrived on that basis - paying for each song. I don't see people objecting to paying 10 cents (or whatever) to read an article.
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 means 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.
I've made a start-up that has really tried making micropayments work (blink.net) and I know there have been many other attempts.
Some of the pain points can always be addressed, as it's just implementation difficulty (having an auto-pay system when opening and article, and actually being able to get a refund within a short time window if the title was clickbait -- with some limitations of course).
The main problems that always remained were:
- the dificutly in convincing a user to actually pay, which was a psichological barrier. People also don't understand that many articles would have to be priced at 20-50 cents, even more, to be worth it, or there should be an issue pass with the actual price of the whole issue.
- the publishing industry being a mess, hard to coordinate as everyone wants to do their own thing, and early experiments failing, ruining the reputation of the idea itself. Many people say micropayments are something that needs a good time, but nobody knows when that time will come.
- the huge fees that processors take (2% + 29 cents), meaning we needed to load into a wallet a minimum of 5$. After learning all the tricks of the industry, I felt a need to throw rotten tomatoes at whoever thinks that cashback should be legal.
The combination always made it a horrible problem, and at this point I'm even considering making the existing project a non-profit, if that might get something off the ground, but now it's just in low-maintenance mode.
This is just off the cuff, but I could go for something sort of like a 'daily paper' deal where I get debited a couple bucks for access to the news papers site for a day, or maybe even just the materials published that day, but that sort of seems more complicated to implement.
Then, if I'm reading it so often that it would be more cost effective to just subscribe they can start pinging me about it.
We have that implemented, it's just that nobody wanted it. Our pitch basically was that "Why can you buy today's paper on the stand, but can't do the same digitally?" Turn out the answer is complicated.
1. A payment processor for users to turn money into tokens
2. A payment processor for news sites to turn tokens into money
3. A software provider to handle the actual microtransaction part of this (unless they want to learn how to become software developers themselves)?
It seems to me like all the blockchain does here is to make it so this transaction needs 3 software providers instead of just one!
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.
Transaction fees for bitcoin sent via the lightning network (which is a layer 2 solution) are in the "less than a cent" category and are settled in a few seconds. This is not fiction, this is i.e. how Trump made his for-the-cameras bitcoin payment during his campaign.
Lightning isn't even a good solution for most diehard bitcoin users. It's a failed project.
It would take 27 years to onboard every internet user to the lightning network unless you start adding level 3 aggregators and then at that point you lose all the benefit of it being on chain at all.
It would take almost 2 years just to onboard every American assuming during that time there were zero other bitcoin transactions. Then you need to add the fees for the on and off ramps to the individual transaction fees to get the real cost per transaction noting that these would go up quite a bit as the competition between lightning and non-lightning uses of the transaction space would drive prices higher.
The throughput is arbitrarialy limited by bitcoin's current block size, which hasn't been increased since satoshi's era.
Most cryptocurrencies have an adaptive block-size mechanism which allows the blocks to grow to a reasonable size which could facilitate such an onboarding of users. So it isn't a technical problem, it is just a question of bitcoin's current leadership, which is controlled by companies like blockstream.
People have been debating the blocksize for a very long time now and there doesn't seem to be any large desire to change it so while the ability to increase it exists changing anything that fundamental about bitcoin seems to be a non-starter and while that is true lightning is pointless as a solution for the masses.
Even if you increase the block size 100x though you're still not improving the numbers much since my very generous numbers ignore activity outside of lightning and assume a single on chain transaction for every user and a perfect network.
Maybe your understanding of lightning is wrong here. Yes you open channels, and transactions in lightning need open channels, but you do NOT NEED to open channels for specific transactions. You open channels once, and transact over them for years. I run a lightning node with more than 15 channels (each to different lightning nodes) that are all older than 1 year (I route payments, so I have way more channels than needed). You can batch-open channels, i.e. I could have opened all my 15 channels with a single on-chain transaction. Taproot update would make those "commitment transactions" onchain way smaller (in byte) than needed to in the past.
Once channels are open, the users on the lightning network can transact back and forth without any new channel opens/closure and thus no on-chain settlement. Hence: Throughput in lightning is not at all limited on the bitcoin transaction throughput.
You mistake is, you overestimate the amount of people who want to be self custodial. You don't need to onboard every human being in the world on-chain.
Given the US example that would be several years in the absolute best for lightning case to onboard even 5% of individuals. Lightning is doomed from the start.
And if you don't care about self custody then the overhead of using a blockchain is a waste.
It is not black/white. It is okay to have the freedom to become self-custodial anytime, but not everybody needs to transact in self-custody all the time.
Taproot was another major step that enables lightning upgrades in future versions (such as zero-fee channel opens) that is barely discussed. The number of X years for onboarding Y amount of people is not accurate, as it disregards all major developments of the last 5 years.
You need enough users for providers to bother making it an option to pay with so it really is black and white. You might get a few niche providers offering it as a payment method without a critical mass of users but most companies aren't going to invest time and effort into implementing a payment system a tiny percentage of users have access too and if I need to trade money with my friends the low % means that in the vast majority of cases they aren't going to have lightning available either.
It will be on bitcoin, and bitcoin only. Except the payment will done with Lightning. And the lightning network will probably be used to send a stablecoin, utilizing taproot assets. But shurely not some shitcoins that is x402 built on (Ethereum, Solana & Co.) :)
I pay $19 per month to some company X, and company X distributes this money to all participating websites I visit during that month, in return I get ad-free access to all the content. And this is implemented in a way that no website learns who I am and company X does not learn which websites I visited.
Or you could cut out the middleman and use a micropayment system like GNU Taler to pay the websites directly.
That way you dont have to hope and pray that the middleman doesn't decide to track you censor, and charge increasing fees, which current middlemen like patreon currently do.
GNU Taler also has a middleman, the exchange. And they play more or less exactly the same role as my company X is supposed to do, exchange money for tokens that are handed to websites when you visit them and which they can then redeem. And I would want to avoid true micro transactions, i.e. pay amount x for looking at one article, because then the amount you spent will depend on how many pages you visited in a given month and that might make you think about each click and in turn hinder adoption. I want to pool the money of all users, divide it by the total number of payed links visited in the last month, and then pay that much per click to each participating website.
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.
this is a good counterpoint, but I would say this in response:
1. Ad networks tend to benefit from having more data. There are economies of scale for sites like Youtube vs random pop-up video hosts that would want to mirror youtube videos, for example. The "bottom" may still be a micropayments system because they're easier to deploy.
2. It's possible that the entire ad economy is destroyed anyways through the use of adblockers, which is increasing. Hence google's push for WEI and the general industry push for TC and such. As long as none of these mechanisms of client authentication are able to take over the web, the profitability for ad networks will dry up.
Absent micropayments, there will be other attempts to introduce sybil resistance to the web, due to threats like AI scraping. Currently people are deploying PoW-based solutions, because they are the lowest effort (they can be implemented by polyfill). I imagine a hybrid PoW/micropayments system could emerge where PoW mining shares could be used interchangeably with micropayments. Basically each website acts as a cryptocurrency mining pool, so the website gets some reward in the mean.
I think the main failure of micropayments lies in the integration with the web browser, it needs some sort of plugin where HTTP 402 is effortless to interact with. It goes without saying that if you don't build it, they won't come.
There is not really a "killer app" yet. Some attempts in the bitcoin community like nostr and stacker.news are marginally used (but only to facilitate bitcoin dork-to-dork communication), and there have been some experiments in live-streaming and gaming. But nothing stands out. The barrier to entry of any app that requires putting money in, even a small amount, is naturally very high. A hybrid PoW/micropayment system is promising because it has the lowest barrier to entry.
On the technical side, you have tradeoffs between the complexity of using the app (especially with bitcoin payment channels) and decentralization. I don't regard it as an intractable problem.
The social problem is that most internet users are short-sighted and don't care about decentralization. They are just looking at some new company/service to throw their money into and escape their current service provider, which creates the problem they are running from. See: users fleeing twitter for bluesky, users fleeing streaming services after fleeing cable.
So pretty much any solution with a tradeoff between complexity and decentralization will suffer compared to a totally centralized and simple solution.
The decentralization of the new system needs to enable some new feature to get a foothold. Facilitating piracy is one such example, it could be the "killer app" for micropayments. Sites like Anna's archive already have some sort of cryptocurrency donation mechanism.
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.
Firstly, that appears to be a negative externality. It seems to affect people who use the conventional credit card system as opposed to the new cryptocurrency/micropayments system I propose. So it has the effect of strengthening the cryptocurrency/micropayments system against competition.
For example, I would say that the credit card system is essentially subsidized through other forms of payment via transaction fees/cashback (I can go into detail why I think this is the case, if you would like). This is a mechanism that benefits the credit card companies at the users of other payment mechanisms (cash, crypto, etc.). So this mechanism of the credit card payment system has the effect of strengthening it against competition.
Secondly, I am not even sure if it's a negative externality. It depends on how fraud is handled in the conventional banking system and who takes the blame. Let's say that the charge-back goes all the way to the exchange, so now the exchange that facilitated the transaction is down both X cryptocurrency and Y dollars. In order to be profitable, the exchange needs to charge more in fees and needs to spend more in surveillance to counteract fraud. So ultimately the users of the exchange would pay for fraud.
Lastly, it is important to differentiate the two sources of fraud. There is the fraud inside of the micropayments system, where I pay 0.01 cents to view a webpage and I don't receive what I want. That's a very low-risk fraud, and by gaining a fraction of a cent, they can lose like 100x that in potential business through micropayments.
Then there is the fraud that happens at the border of "hard" money (cash/precious metals/crypto) and "soft" chargeback-able money in the conventional credit card system. This is pretty much facilitated just by these hard forms of money existing and being exchangeable with soft money. I would argue the weakness lies in the insecurity of the soft money systems (specifically the outdated systems of authentication). But you could still apply some sort of limit to the amount of money a single bank account can exchange for crypto (say, $20 a day) without hurting the micropayments system, because the payments involved are so small. So the risk of fraud at the exchange could be much lower for this specific use-case of cryptocurrency.
Even in a fully crypto world there is still boundless fraud potential. Even more than traditional banking.
The most obvious one that comes to mind is someone gets a script to run on your browser that loads a ton of the attackers 1 cent paywall articles. Any legitimate financial tool needs a way to roll back fraudulent transactions.
I imagine that the micropayments system would be facilitated transparently through some popup in the browser, similar to how the browser asks for use of your webcam. I also imagine that some basic, configurable limits would be involved. It would look like "Give news.com ability to request up to 0.10 cents (0.01cents per page load)? Y/N". The first time you load the page.
This is an aside, but in an ideal world, such a mechanism would also be used to reduce fingerprinting! You would have to accept a popup for a page to use features like WebGL, for example.
>Any legitimate financial tool needs a way to roll back fraudulent transactions.
I strongly disagree. I would even say the opposite: the ability to bureaucratically roll-back transactions threatens the legitimacy of money. Specifically, it makes the money non-fungible.
In cryptocurrency, there are transparent multisignature-based escrow systems that allow you to have a defined window of time where the money is co-managed according to certain rules. But transactions need to be able reach a "finalized" state where they are irreversible. Otherwise you just can't ever have a truly secure method of payment between untrustworthy parties and micropayments become useless.
Also, it does not need to be cryptocurrency. Micropayments just need to be efficient, secure, and irreversible. There are other payment systems based on Chaumian cash, (GNU taler being one example) that this could be built on.
But how many people would really go to another site just to save 0.002? I can already go to the internet archive to read paywalled content. If needed and that option will still be available for the people that dont want to pay the 0.002.
Its a social problem and all it takes is one player breaking through. People have done this with far far worse things that people thought were unviable socially. Microbetting, microloans, gaming microtransactions, hardware subscriptions,
Your response is predicated on the fact that sites like archive.org already exist and don't charge. In a world with accessible micropayments, I think pretty much everyone would charge.
Sites like the internet archive are already funded by donations from viewers like you. I see the scheme as essentially spreading out the donations based on who uses the most bandwidth. It makes it easier for anyone to spin up a mirror of archive.org, and it makes it more secure for sites like archive.org to accept donations.
"Intermediate" micropayment solutions already exist. Anna's archive charges like $5 a month for a "donation" that puts you in a fast lane to download PDFs that you would otherwise have to get from some book site or a scientific journal. I bet they would prefer to charge per-download if they could feasibly do it.
I agree that some (most?) applications of micropayments are really gimmicky. But some applications are naturally suited to micropayments. The advantage of micropayments is that you can interact with ad-hoc vendors without setting up a pre-existing financial trust-relationship. For example, you could be at an bus terminal and have several pop-up vendors for wifi or electricity that charge per MB or per watt-hour. It enables competition.
The more gimmicky applications you mention like hardware subscriptions all involve some element of vendor-lock in that prohibits the advantage of micropayments systems in dealing with ad-hoc vendors. This is more analogous to those in-flight wifi services on airplanes: there is an established financial relationship with the airline and no competition, so there's little use for the low-risk micropayments.
I dont think everyone would charge. I think everyone who currently runs ads would charge but there would still be purists who host without ads and without micro transactions. It would still cost to implement the processing on your website and simple sites would not want to do this. It might lower the barrier to donation so sites funded by donation could receive more donations but still keep it optional.
Internet archive is not funded on donations from viewers. Its funded off government grants and corporate donations. individual donations make up a tiny %. Micropayments would make Internet archive less reliant on charity from government and corporations and it would not impact peoples ability to spin up a mirror. people can already spin up a mirror but its expensive and would remain expensive.
Anna's archive is whale pricing, a tiny % of people are willing to pay that $5 and the hope is that they subsize costs for the rest of users. I hate this type of monetization and will always oppose it as its highly risky and unfair.
> For those who disagree, ask yourselves; would you pay me 2 cents before you click that link.
A straw man. That's not the only way to do it. Asking this instead is helpful: "what might make this work?" and explore that in depth and try some experiments.* It might be a collective action problem or a first-mover problem or a culture problem. Such classes of problems are hard, sometimes even insanely hard for anyone lacking massive influence, but not categorically unworkable or impossible.
> I get the sentiment but micropayments just don’t work
I don't buy this generalization. Maybe micropayments don't "work" yet according to some (unstated, unfortunately) ideas of scope or degree. But smallish payments have worked (to some degree, for some periods of time) for music downloads and political contributions, just to mention a few things. There is something to smaller-than-usual payments, this seems pretty clear. (Yes, there is a sort of lower quantum based on the slice a payment processor takes, so creative bundling is often needed.)
Maybe micropayments according to some particular definition are unlikely to work for online content under current constraints. Still, the world is a big place, and the future (hopefully) leaves a lot of room for experimentation.
Aside: maybe a bigger problem is the status-quo idea of "news". Most of the "news" I real feels almost like junk food.
* I prefer to ask "what would make something work?" or "what is blocking something from working?" rather than claiming "X can (or can't) work". This is not because I'm naive or an optimist. I'm neither. But I'm genuinely curious about how and why things work, and the way one frames the question has a big effect on where your brain leads you.
P.S. WRT exaggeration or overconfidence: just say no. Let's make nuance the norm. It can start here, one comment at a time.
P.P.S. I'll say this again, and it _should_ make people uncomfortable: I'm getting more value out of interacting with a high quality LLM with a solid prompt than a typical comment on HN, and this does not bode well. I still hope that people can step it up, but we're not there yet, for various reasons.
Micropayments is something that I think the internet as a whole needs. However, I don't think the mental model people usually have isn't quite "micro" and frictionless enough.
Imagine a world where your web browser essentially contains and controls your wallet. You pre-pay into that wallet, say, $20. I imagine we'll probably also refer to that as "credits" so internationalization isn't so tough. So let's pretend we have 2000 credits. Now, let's start browsing the internet.
You start by conducting a web search. Perhaps there is a mechanism in HTML and the browser that basically say, "Clicking this will cost 1c". We'd probably develop a shorthand, some icon and beside it, it says the price in credits. Imagine a button like [(1c) Search].
Immediately, what is the benefit? The search engine works for you. It's like Kagi in that regard, but you didn't need to set up an account and give them your credit card information. YOU are the customer. There are no ads, they need to compete to make the search results the best, otherwise you're going somewhere else. You're no longer the product.
You see a news article in your search result. Fantastic. You visit the news website - there isn't an ad in sight. Pure news. The article starts with a title, a few lines, perhaps the first paragraph, and to read more, you click that [2c Read the Article] button. You click it, and boom, you see the entire article. No subscriptions, no popups, no ads. You are the customer. The news site wants you to be happy, not advertisers. You.
The news article discusses a new open source project that is really taking off. Cool! You click the link. Looks pretty neat! You download it, toy with it, and find that it's actually pretty useful! You go back to their repo site, and there's a little tip option. Easy peasy. You tip them 100 credits. No signing up for an account at some other site, no entering your credit card, just done and done.
I like the idea of micropayments because it makes the user the customer again. The internet has become incredibly hostile to users since we are, by and large, the product rather than the customer. We need to flip the incentive model. Does it suck to pay for things on the internet? A little. But I'd rather that and get a great experience (and also allow news organizations to have a working business model, etc) than what we have now.
Taxes and AML/KYC kill this. People need to surveil their customers in order to comply with legal requirements. As soon as money is involved there's so much bureaucracy people just contract it out to intermediaries like Stripe and by then payments are anything but micro.
The real innovation of cryptocurrency is that it allows people to think outside the box of AML/KYC.
Stablecoins, which not decentralized at all (and thus defeat the entire purpose of cryptopcurrency) are allowed to break the rules by wearing the label of "cryptocurrency", with the implication being that cryptocurrencies are just going to break the rules anyways.
Yeah, BAT was supposed to be exactly this, you'd mine it by browsing and tolerating non targeted ads from your browser and you'd pay it to content creators in lieu of tolerating their targeted ads.
It was a great idea, but I get the feeling that it stalled somewhere along the way.
If I'm publishing something, I want maximum revenue.
If I can guarantee repeat customers then I can make the reader the sole focus, but if I still have to maximise based on capricious trends and search indexing, then I'll probably maximse the payment, the adds, and sell your data as well.
Subscription services are probably the only way, unless we see a consolidation of hosts with a consistent brand and quality, enough to trust a micro transaction will get something of the quality I expect.
I imagine micropayments for small sites to avoid DoS (e.g. from dumb AI scrapers) and maybe get decent profit if they become very popular, but mainly pay to keep the server running. They would be so small that someone who spends their entire day visiting different websites would pay less than their phone bill; and centralized scrapers with a decent amount of funding would still work.
Real funding would come in ways that don't depend on visitor count: patronage, government/industry grants, people running the sites having side jobs, UBI. Because:
- I'd rather avoid intellectual property and allow AI summaries, remixes, etc. without penalty to the main site
- Visitor count tends to benefit mainstream sites. Patronage and grants can support niche sites who expect few users that are willing to pay more, without gating mainstream visitors (via higher visitor micropayments) in case they become popular
- Visitor count benefits sites that have already been built. Patronage and grants support sites that look promising, but haven't been built and may fail. The latter include indie and experimental sites; the former only include sites that are easy to build, and sites whose success is predictable from people that already have money
- I'm skeptical that revenue from visitor count (even from ads or subscriptions) will remain sustainable long-term
The above doesn't only apply to traditional sites, but any digital product including ones people currently pay for, like books, movies, and video games. These creators need to make a living, but since their product is not physical, there is no need to tie revenue to copies sold, and I suspect tying revenue to patronage and grants would lead to better products.
> 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.
I'm reminded of how tedious it is when people debate how small something has to be before it can be called a microservice... Maybe the language needs to focus on something besides size.
If you pre-pay, you're creating a debt which is destroyed when service is rendered. If you post-pay you're creating a debt when service is rendered that is destroyed when you pay. In both cases the logic of when and how you pay is decoupled from the thing you're paying for. You've got to ask how far you'll let the two accountings drift (sync monthly is a common choice).
My feeling for "micropayments" is that they happen as part of the same protocol which is providing service. There's just one accounting. Settlement schedule is determined by the nature of the service. Maybe it's page views or packets or gulps, but whatever it is it's imposed by circumstance. They're... situated payments?
The difference is that in micropayments the debt is practicially nothing, a fraction of a cent. So there's basicially no risk. Pre-pay, post-pay, doesn't really matter.
With minipayments, you could still lose a dollar or something. It's like a vending machine. If I put in a dollar and don't get a cookie, I will be pissed. You can run a buisness of setting up fraudulent vending machines that scam customers on the first purchase and dont put out cookies.
I don't really care if I put a tenth of a cent in and don't get my crumb out. I just won't buy the rest of the cookie. The margin on selling me the whole cookie is greater than scamming me out of a fraction of a cent. So it's not feasible to scam.
So the distinction matters. It's a difference in kind because in one model there is enough risk to sustain a buisness model off of scamming, which requires all this extra infrastructure for fraud prevention.
The benefit of micropayments is you don't need all this overhead for for fraud. Anyone can set up a vending machine pretty much anywhere and sell to anyone else.
The $1 in-game content payments are already so well known (and for such a long time) as "micropayments" I had thought that was where the term originated.
Isn’t it microtransactions? Which kind of hints at the difference, since it’s all the ceremony of a two party transaction, while micropayments proposals usually have some focus on being automatic or frictionless
As a disgruntled journo who’s doing mostly very different things to live, I believe the fundamental issue is that we keep treating journalism as a business.
It is not sustainable as such anymore for a long time, and keeping it structured as a business creates all sorts of wrong incentives.
Good journalism today comes mostly from no profits, and that is the only model that makes sense in my view. Make it so that foundations and governments can legally fund newspapers from a non political organ and have a charity-style funding process.
That’s true for newspapers but not really for tv, so this is not a panacea.
In general I find it fascinating how we try to analyze all sorts of business cases for newspapers except this one (aka they’re not a business anymore).
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...
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.
It's a micropayment proxy using network authentication, billing on your ISP bill, with a reload grace period to prevent double-billing. It was deployed by France Telecom in its Wanadoo retail Internet service, but most of the money they made was from selling ringtones, not the original purpose of migrating Minitel service providers to the Web.
Micropayments would be devastating for news because they'd reveal what people actually value at the margin. Subscriptions work precisely because they obscure this — you pay $15/mo and read 3 articles, and the newspaper pretends that's fine.
Per-article pricing would expose that 90% of online journalism is commodity rewrites of AP wire stories. The 10% that's genuinely original would thrive, and everything else would die overnight. Which is exactly why no major outlet will ever voluntarily adopt this.
>> And—like any other payments directly from readers—micropayments would be a multiplier for advertising, not an alternative.
WTF, no way
>> no drug like attention ... help develop the habit....
Mark Z. again ??
legit advertisers ?¿?
Are there any ?? taboola and their ilk unremovable apps ? anybody wants their heads blow up?
>>The survival of legit sites depends on how quickly marketers can level up to stuff
Bonkers. Legit sites depend on reaching financial independence on legit valuable content that people want to read.
It is true that I look to this from an EU perspective. I am biased
Time ago a colleague and I pitched YC for compsate.com, basically a wallet (real money, forget crypto) based system ( no subscriptions ) for news/content micropayments system.
The idea was based on no adds, no tracking, read news like you buy a newspaper at the kiosk. Pay 2 orders of magnitude more for each article you read (than what ads provide per page), your choice. Replenish wallet at will.
Logging into a system (acquiring an ID token in the process), then browse freely to any news site and read any content, including pay-walled which would be paid out of your wallet.
All near real time. Small amounts would drive down risk of fraud, that could be as well controlled by the selection of news stand that can join.
Pay for what you read, compensate for the value of what you read, make your news source independent (at least financially).
We fail the pitch but I believe it still is doable and preferable for the media if they would set up such a platform together. You know the commons....sometimes wins.
> We know that micropayments can work because mobile games are a thing
Do we?
If anything, we know micropayments won't result in quality journalism because mobile games are a thing.
> but mobile game developers have figured out how to get people to spend money on in-app-purchases (IAP), by turning it into a two-step process.
Nah. I mean yes this is one of the psychological tricks that makes players pay on mobile, but it's not that big a deal. The real deal of mobile games:
- Difficult curve design: you know how slot machines show you two matching symbols and one off, instead of three random ones? It has to make the player feel like they can reasonably beat the level, but just "a little bit unlucky..."
- PvP element: Basically pay to win, but presented more like 'grind to win.' Free players can theoratically beat who paid if they grind for needed resources for thousands of hours. So they can tell themselves that they're just 'saving time' when they eventually pay.
- Soft porn: A lot of mobile games from Chinese/Japanes/Korean publishers are just soft porn by western standards.
Are these what we want to replicate on news sites? I think this article sugarcoats the dark patterns in mobile games to convince the author themselves that micropayment won't lead to a race to the bottom.
IMO the thread is asking the wrong question ("can micropayments work?") They can, but we need to start with first principals on what's technically necessary to move value, and what can we toss out (from both traditional/card systems and crypto). You need a linearly scalable state machine and a means of orchestrating the changes in that state between actors. Everything else (kyc, fraud protections, etc.) is secondary. Machines are likely going to be paying extreme small amounts between each other, so its highly questionable whether that state machine (a) needs to protect for fraud at .001 cents per tx and (b) whether a machine, acting on its own accord, spending .001 was contemplated during the construction of the bank secrecy act (which had the de minimis oversight of transactions at ~82k USD in 2026 values). Ensure no double spend, ensure that the machines can move value as needed, change the state. Ensure that the system scales as much as the volumes of transactions needed. And charge effectively free rates (we're at 10m tx/usd). Lots more to build here, but we're not far off. (and we're launching soon at radiustech.xyz). Come check us out.
eCash is an answer to "can you move value privately?" (yes, with concessions). Radius is solving "can you execute a million conditional state transitions per second at sub-penny costs?" Blind signatures are still just value transfers and offer no expressivity. If your agent wants DvP with conditional logic, or trustless escrow that releases on programmatic conditions, Chaumian eCash doesn't help. LN gets you close to some forms of atomic exchange, but close-to-atomic isn't atomic, and neither gives you composability. You can move balances, but you can't orchestrate multi-step workflows that can't unwind in the middle.
I imagine you could have some contract that interacts with ecash, based on revelation of a blind signature. Similar to a HTLC.
I have actually written up some ideas for a system based on something like this that I called "chaumian coupons", but I would have to go through my notes to find it.
Indeed, for any particular outcome you could design a custom protocol. In contrast, Radius gives you a generic execution environment. Going custom you lose EVM tooling, audited standard contracts, and every bespoke protocol needs its own security analysis, its own edge case handling, and its own integration work.
That said, the most important loss is composability: an agent can't take your Chaumian coupon escrow and snap it together with someone else's DvP protocol and a third party's rate-limiting wallet in a single atomic transaction. The power of a shared execution environment is that these interaction patterns don't need to be anticipated and designed around in advance. Agents aren't going to negotiate which custom protocol to use for every interaction (the necessary protocol might not even exist!), they will use shared infrastructure where composability of various primitives is the effortless default.
I think that in the large, efficiency does matter. You are optimizing a three-variable problem of efficiency, decentralization, and configuration of the smart contracts.
The fact that AI agents are involved does not nessisarially tilt the scale towards the configurability of smart contracts. If you have extra cognition, you can probably spend some time thinking about what specialized protocol to use.
I am pessimistic on etherium and similar "open-ended" scripting cryptocurrencies because everything they can do can be replicated with a specialized cryptocurrency. So as soon as some killer app emerges (e.g. ENS) people will realize that it's more cheap/fast/decentralized to do this with a specialized system (e.g. namecoin).
The open-ended systems like etherium can only succeed if there is demand for constantly-novel open-ended scripting that interacts with other open-ended scripts all the time. I really don't think that's the case. If you can capture 90% of the use case with different specialized cryptocurrencies and do atomic swaps between them, that will always be better from a technological standpoint.
The fundamental limit of cryptocurrencies is bandwidth, and how much data you can sync between all nodes: either you have a few high-bandwidth nodes or many low-bandwidth nodes. Splitting different contracts across networks is naturally better than sharing a single blockchain and competing for gas.
People don't want this to be the case because you can't achieve vendor/cryptocurrency lock in, and "competition is for losers". If you have multiple independent blockchains, you pretty much must have multiple tokens. But it's true.
The moat for "utility" smart-contract systems is dependent on the cost of switching, which will be lowered by AI if anything. At the end of the day you can just fork the blockchain if you don't like the tokenomics or even just the fees. Some assembly required, but that is why stuff like litecoin can exist in this market.
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.
Put out good content that people want to read and people will read it and pay you for it. Youtubers do fine with inconsistent revenue for each video. There is usually less risk writing an article than producing a video.
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
The YouTube Premium model seems to be the way forward here. In short, pay $5 per month and every video you watch gets paid slightly more per view than they would if you watched ads. Expanding this to a larger ecosystem may require a larger fee, but avoiding the friction of people deciding whether the marginal cost to read an article is worth it is an obvious win.
i believe in the world of long-form text content, this is the medium.com model. the've been working at this for a while, i think even before youtube premium existed.
they're still kicking, but it hasn't exactly been a roaring success.
Relevant data point: built httpay.xyz which applies this model beyond news to any API. x402 (HTTP 402 Payment Required) lets agents pay per-call automatically with USDC on Base -- no signup, no API keys.
Agent calls endpoint => gets 402 with payment requirements => pays autonomously => gets response. 121 endpoints so far ($0.001-$0.005 each).
First real paying users came in this week. The agents paid, got the data, moved on. Exactly as intended.
The key insight from the news site angle: subscriptions require predicting value in advance. Per-call payments flip that -- you only pay for what you actually use. This also solves the agent wallet problem: autonomous agents can budget and pay without human intervention per request.
I used to work on for a company on a product that did exactly this, but the company stopped working on that product since it didn't go anywhere (API docs seem to still be online though :D https://docs.satoshipay.io/api/).
Some small publishers liked it, big ones wanted to force their customers to subscribe (whilst recording their data at the same time).
I really like the general idea though and hope it does make a comeback. I think it would be good for review/test sites especially.
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.
I assume it was more about dollars and cents than pretensions. Scroll was plausible as a replacement for ad network revenue, but at $5/month it can't come close to robust subscription or premium ad revenue. NYT subscription is more than the entire $5.
I believe the main reason that Flattr failed was just bad execution. After a successful start and Flattr being used more and more, they just stopped iterating on it, leaving it dormant for years. Partnering with Adblock Plus was the final nail in the coffin.
People already pay for journalism through substack. It's not micropayments, it's a commitment to the ongoing consumption of a high quality creator's work.
I can't think of a single news outlet that isn't obviously propaganda or virtue porn. People who want that can have it, but the internet has has made the business models common knowledge, and now most people would be embarrassed to consume these outlets.
All of that was true before prediction markets, now if a fact is important enough, it has a market, and if I need to know the best take on that fact, I will look at the market.
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.
If one thinks about this problem deeply, and the current solution of showing ads, you may realize that micro transactions are already “implemented”. Ads are paid for by the advertiser as mille-impressions (or conversion, etc), which works way better than demanding money at that level - and they get it no matter what. This implicit payment works way better than making consumers think about it and start the debate of value and trust and so on that everyone are debating here.
Micropayments gives me flexibility that subscription doesn't. I'm happy to pay $5 a month just to read Matt Levin. I'm not paying $40 for Bloomberg subscription. It also gives publishers signal on what really users care about and more importantly what are they willing to pay for. Maybe, there is a truly crypto market here for micropayments without the overhead of operators like Stripe
I have long been a big proponent of micropayments. I wish more news sites tested it out. Heck any kind of site, don’t bother me with a notification that I am using an adblocker, just ask in same pop up for me to pay $0.1 to view the page or whatever the market rate is.
Absolutely nothing has changed since the 90s. News should be free. Free with unobtrusive ads if you want pictures and video to help with hosting costs. Stop trying to fiddle with this formula. lite.cnn.com is all we will ever need in terms of getting the message. Mircopayments are not a solution because nothing needs to be fixed.
Good journalists don't aspire to become wealthy. I meant what I wrote. The cost to fetch the article off a server and display it on my screen is too cheap to measure. A few ads will cover it.
Pro Tipp:
Use Revolut or Privacy.com and create a new virtual number, then buy with this the "1 month for free for 1 USD" testsubscription here and there - then you just cancel/destroy the virtual number immediately
In my country there are some newspaper/magazines/etc. which are prohibiting Archive.IS/PH very very good because of their detection - at some this is working.
I would leave something about the article but I can't get over the horrendous layout of this website. Why is the article using only 20-30% of the horizontal space?
Why is the left pane similar posts wrapping after 2 or 3 words?
Shocking. I'd pay $1.00 to load this article and have it look decent.
Often times on fal.ai I'm trying a new text to image model and I just get an error. I try again, fail, try again and it works. Sad seeing it take $0.05 and give me an error but most of the time I pull the one-armed bandit again.
> We know that micropayments can work because mobile games are a thing.
We know that micropayments can work because slot machines are a thing, but I don't think most people would say that's what entertainment should be.
Similarly, journalism can do better. Are people going to pay $0.20 to read "One thing financial advisors won't tell you, you'll retire 10 years earlier!", or are you going to pay $0.20 for "‘It feels like a worse version of Lotto’: what Australians told us about the great intergenerational wealth transfer" (a Guardian special report from today).
I know I'd rather pay to read the latter, but between clickbait and optimising revenue, the former is going to perform a lot better. Not to mention that the cost to produce slop content will be near zero, so they can charge less, where the cost to produce high quality content will be far higher and will therefore not be able to compete on price.
I'd much rather commit to paying $10 a month for news and then choose which articles get a share of that after reading. If I've already committed it costs me nothing to pay for an article, but by doing it after reading I can much more easily support good journalism. The problem with that is that it will probably trend towards just the news subs we have today.
This is a problem that I've been thinking on for years now.
It used to be common to just buy a newspaper without handing out any kind of personal information. Walk up to a newsagent/kiosk, hand over a small amount of money, and voila, you have your news.
Then came subscriptions. Great for publishers and advertisers: they have predictibility in how many papers to print, know exactly when and where to deliver them, and advertisers know exactly how many people their printed ads will reach. But it came at the cost of having to provide the paper (or their distributor, maybe your local paper boy) with your address and payment details.
Then came news sites. Initially entirely free because the web was new and no one knew what they were doing. Then with ads. Then with more and more intrusive ads, which started harvesting and stealing personal information against our wishes, which started being used to create highly specific profiles of people. To all the better serve more ads.
Then came paywalls. Where in order to read an article, you now have to go through to the ads/profiling spiel, AND on top of that you have to hand out your name/address/email/payment details just to read a single god damned article.
I would love for us to have a way to go back to the original situation. I give you money, and only money, you give me news. No name. No address. No ad profiling. Zilch.
But because of a fear of terrorists, anonymous payments on the interwebs are effectively impossible.
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.
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)
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...
I agree Scroll seemed very promising but I'm not sure how successful they were. Did they provide more income than ads from subscription fees? Meeting that goal while burning investors money is less impressive.
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.
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.
The artists are there because of their own free will. They voluntarily signed their contracts with the record labels. How are journalists and independent journalism doing in comparison?
+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.
The problem we have is that there are a ton of sites all asking for $5+. With PBS people can choose to give once at whatever they're comfortable with and aren't dealing with an ever increasing number of $5 charges. Some guy's Medium blog probably isn't worth $5 just like I wouldn't pay $5 for any random show on PBS. But donating to PBS once makes me feel like I'm supporting Frontline, Ken Burns, lots of people I like.
Right. The problem is all the cooperation required. So then what's needed is an open platform that lets people put in their $10, and then sites can choose to implement it. It's a chicken and the egg problem. It hasn't worked in the past, but times change. Instead of looking at this like 3D televisions or VR, the counter example to think about is tablets — (note: human typed emdash) the Apple Newton was a flop, but the iPad is anything but. Or electric cars. The EV1 by GM was a flop and whatever you think about Elon Musk and Tesla, they do exist now. Video calling is another one. The 90's version just didn't work, but I use Facetime almost every day.
The rails exist for micropayments with cryptocurrency, it's "just" going to take the right person and the right software to implement it for it to happen. The problem is money. LEDs that come in blue are foundational to our modern society. Without blue, we'd only have red and green. Unfortunately for him, the inventor of the blue LED, the man who poured his everything into making it, isn't ridiculously wealthy. For micropayments to happen, some one selfless and not seeking to make a profit on it, need to come along and make it a thing. So I don't know if it'll happen, because ghostty's funding model can't be replicated, but a man can dream.
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 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.
> Fact-checkers and whatever you call people that gauge political biases aren't impartial sources of information. Someone pays their bills and those people typically have agendas besides delivering objective truth.
That's meaningless: It's like saying everyone is a liar or everyone is violent, or a potential murderer or everyone's partner is an adulterer. Yes, anyone can, everyone lies, nobody is perfect - but some people are 'honest' and some are 'liars' and there is all the difference in the world.
It's not though? People aren't doing fact-checking out of kindness, they're doing it because they're being paid to do it. The people paying them expect a certain outcome from their fact-checking activities, and objectivity doesn't really factor into the picture, but ensuring a certain narrative prevails, does.
Pretending that a news story is factually correct because someone is getting paid to check it for accuracy is asinine. The fact checkers themselves have biases and aren't objective sources of truth, same with the people supplying their paychecks.
The fact that people have the capacity to lie and be violent, but that not everyone is a liar or a murderer is obvious and doesn't need to be stated.
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.
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.
Very few sites offer quality, original, important content.
Nobody wants to pay for a site the repeats the same old stuff that every other site does, especially when those other sites don't have a paywall. This drives the cost of content to zero, which leads companies to rely on ads, and ad blockers to block those ads.
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
I used to find this and the whole idea of "Web3" ridiculous, but with the recent saturation of low-quality slop and disinformation, perhaps it's time to reconsider.
I enjoy reading thorough publications written by actual humans who have something to say. Part of why I'm here. And I'd take micropayments over subscriptions anytime.
There's just one catch nobody seems to be eager to talk about. While I'm willing to pay that 1¢, if it's 1¢ + any identifying information, I'm out.
seriously, this bullshit and ISP raising prices of what's basically UBER cheap: transporting data to others via internet
information should be free and not locked under paywalls; in no time if this pill is swallowed you will have the same level of shallow articles but this time, all paid
> 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?
Let's say a journalist writes an excellent article about something political of serious import. I'm fine with paying for that article to get access to it.
But, really, the article is a lot more useful to me if other people can access it too. Since everyone can vote, I want the whole populace to be informed, even poor people.
I wonder if there is a viable business model where for each article, readers can pay to unlock it not just for themselves, but for everyone. The price would obviously have to be higher since you aren't just buying it for yourself. But perhaps the sense of "I'm helping build a better-informed world and helping broadcast my values" would encourage people to pay that higher price.
Maybe you could do something cumulative and Kickstarter-like where there's a threshold for the article to be unlocked and anyone can chip in to getting it over the line. This would take advantage of human psychology that we like being part of something bigger than ourselves.
And it would hopefully have the emergent property that news that people feel is actually valuable gets spread more widely than useless junk.
You could even list the names of the sponsors of the article when it gets unlocked (if they didn't want to be anonymous). How cool would be to one of the people who helped an important story "break"?
I wonder if there is a viable business model where for each article, readers can pay to unlock it not just for themselves, but for everyone. The price would obviously have to be higher since you aren't just buying it for yourself. But perhaps the sense of "I'm helping build a better-informed world and helping broadcast my values" would encourage people to pay that higher price.
What you're asking for is the system we already have, except at a micro level rather than a macro level. Rich people buy out newspapers to signal-boost their own preferred messages to the public.
I think it's questionable that the "news that people feel is actually valuable" is what really ought to be spread. Some of the most valuable news is local reporting on the daily business of municipal governments. Regular people are notoriously uninterested in local politics, despite the outsized impact it has on their lives. Many of the most mundane decisions made in municipal councils go completely unnoticed yet they can destroy whole communities in the long run.
>Many of the most mundane decisions made in municipal councils go completely unnoticed yet they can destroy whole communities in the long run.
They go unnoticed because of scaling issues, not because people are per se less interested in local politics than national politics. If you write a story about a decision on the local city council, it is of interest to maybe a few hundred thousand, whereas a story about Congress is of interest to tens of millions. Even if people were ten times as interested in local news (as measured by their willingness to subscribe or the amount of ads they are willing to be exposed to), it would still make more sense to send a reporter to the Capitol before City Hall.
I think a lot of our issues today are because people are too engaged in federal politics. It's turned into a massive spectacle on the same level as the NFL.
That seems to be the point; WWE USA: Blue Team vs Red Team, The Democracy Simulation Show. Everyone has the same and equal meaningless vote.
> Everyone has the same and equal meaningless vote.
There is one vote that is not meaningless: the primaries. A lot of the issues y'all have is that Democrats and Republicans alike don't bother to vote in the primaries. That is how you got people like MTG or Trump, that is how you get people like Chuck Schumer stuck in office for far too long.
AOC/The Squad and Mamdani both proved that it is possible to succeed in a primary and offer voters an actual alternative to the corporate owned shills.
After Bernie got shuffled out in 16 I'm not sure anyone cares believes that primaries matter either.
You don’t have choice in the primary either. See what happened with the democrats and trying to stymie a sanders candidacy.
You mean the primary where Biden ran virtually unopposed and then Harris got the nomination?
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> not because people are per se less interested in local politics than national politics
Actually I believe this is exactly the issue. Most people are interested more in national politics than county or even state politics. Of the people I know who vote in national elections, very few vote in local ones or even go to city council meetings.
> Rich people buy out newspapers to signal-boost their own preferred messages to the public.
Right, but micro level difference matters here. If a middle-class person can help an important story reach an audience, that's helpful for democracy. When a billionaire buys a newspaper, it isn't.
This is also why I think suggesting it work like a kickstarter where multiple people can pool money to unlock an article would be helpful. It naturally collects the will of many people in a democratic way.
This is basically political fundraising, where rich people signal-boost their preferred candidate and help them attract lots of donors from the public.
I think the fundamental piece you're missing is the Pareto principle. In any popularity contest, the most attention accrues to the most popular. This naturally leads to a power law distribution in popularity.
I'm actually wondering if Citizens United will prove to be a stabilizing force.
https://www.cnn.com/2026/02/18/politics/texas-senate-primary... shows that, in this year's Texas race, the centrists are getting more funding than the culture warriors even though the culture warriors are more popular.
Granted, that's only a single data point.
It sounds quite aligned with how assurance contracts[1] work.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assurance_contract
The solution to increasing interest in local government is to strengthen the federal system (repealing the 17th amendment) & even extending it into state government (state senators should be appointed by, say, the city councils of the 24 largest municipalities in said state).
This decentralization of power would bring the peoples' focus back to their own neighborhoods, where they can actually hold government officials accountable.
That’s a recipe for corruption and minority rule. It centralizes, not decentralizes, power, in the hands of fewer people. I would advise looking to effectively any senatorial appointment from the gilded age to see why the 17th was needed: monetary exchanges for senatorial seats was widespread, race-based disenfranchisement was a reality, and in one state, Utah, a theocracy was nearly cemented. A greater focus on local rights, and greater federalist powers, should not preclude senatorial elections.
>> Maybe you could do something cumulative and Kickstarter-like where there's a threshold for the article to be unlocked and anyone can chip in to getting it over the line. This would take advantage of human psychology that we like being part of something bigger than ourselves.
This sort of happens with Substack, albiet not as explicitly. People become "Founding Sponsors" or "Paid Subscribers" and they effectively subsidize it for everyone else because they appreciate the author's work and want the author to succeed. Authors often want to give away the content since it is indeed better if everyone can read it (as you note) -- but often cannot sustain it without a minimum set of sponsors.
I think you are speaking about this happening at the article level rather than publication level, which seems pretty hard since the readership would be fractured and long-tailed.
You're basically describing the Random Model by Greg Stolze[0]
Basically someone creates a work and puts a price on it and then like with Kickstarter asks people to fund it, however after it's funded it becomes public and is released into the public domain
-[0]: unfortunately I can't find the original article, but this covers gist of it https://caffeineforge.com/2012/11/26/the-ransom-model/
FWIW, LWN.net has a form of this, where a subscriber can share a "guest" link for a subscriber-only article (All such articles become open a week later anyhow).
It's bad form to share guest links on aggregators like HN, I don't think LWN has a quota on the number of accesses on Guest links. On the other hand, the occasional widely-shared guest link may bring a few more subscribers, but I doubt this scales.
It's actually not bad form to share guest links on aggregators, for that reason — we're entirely subscriber-funded, and we get a lot of new subscribers coming in via subscriber links, which is why we keep offering them. It's always nice when one of my articles end up being shared widely.
Although we do tend to notice trends in what kinds of articles make it onto aggregators like HN and which ones don't; if you've enjoyed LWN's technical reporting, but you've been getting it all filtered through HN or lobste.rs, you might like to come look at the website directly and see some of the wider content mix that we work on.
The system you describe is already implemented at least on this French independent media "Arrêt sur Images". Subscribers can vote to gift articles to the public.
(I'll link Wikipedia as a proxy to avoid HN hug of DDOS https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arr%C3%AAt_sur_images English version has not been updated so recently)
Sorry to be the wet blanket but what you're arguing for, advocacy, is by far the worst and most ineffective form of doing politics. Talking about things doesn't convince anyone. Talking to the small amounts of people that agree doesn't get the balling moving.
Want to know what does? Organizing. Getting people that disagree with you, to agree with you. That never happens through advocacy, you have to organize.
Organizing is often less about convincing people that are in hard opposition and more about moving ppl that are pro, soft or uninformed. Then moving those people to take actions that advance the ball in their own interests or the interest of allies. You can really only move people that are hard against when the stakes are low and they have no ideological commitment against what you are suggesting. Getting someone to change ideologically is a slow or impossible process that comes from changes in social position and inner changes.
This isn't true in my experience as a party operator at all. You can easily move MAGA to progressive quite simply, do some deep canvassing but you'll find out that there are more agreements that people care about (healthcare costs, housing costs, poor salaries, poor retirement, decaying society) where you can build on top of.
Also what you're saying goes against the most effective union advice from people like Jane McAlevey that have successfully implemented strikes with >95% participation rates and getting workers effectively everything they ask for. Want to know how she is able to achieve this? She talks to those that people respect and follow in the workplace, often these people are at odds against you.
In her books she has given example after example on how she would convert people that were leading the anti-union efforts into being pro-union joining the cause.
Sorry man, just because your organizational skills are terrible doesn't me that there aren't real effective ways to do this.
Those people weren't ideologically against you on housing, healthcare, or poor salaries etc. If they were, you wouldn't be able to convince them. The reason they were easier to move is because of their class position. If you talked to a business owner, they would be against improving many of those things, particularly poor salaries and retirement. Healthcare keeps employees tied to work too.
With workers, there isn't an economic interest against changing those positions. With a business owner there is. I'm sure you understand this since you are talking about unions. In the taxonomy I described, I would categorize the people you're talking to as "soft" or "uninformed" because you are encouraging them to take action in their own interest.
Once again, I implore you to actually do some political organizing because you're just spouting nothing meaningful in general. Good luck.
Organizing still requires access to ground truth information. It's not enough for people to be organized. They do need to be organized around actual good ideas which requires information.
Organizing without journalism is just religious evangelism and mob justice.
No, this still doesn't matter. Just still waste of time of time caring about what journalists think over activating the local community into your cause.
Go read "No Shortcuts" by Jane McAlevey to understand what effective organizing is.
I don't think you're hearing me.
You are presuming that one has a cause and that that cause is correct.
But where does that presumption come from? In order to be worth supporting, a cause does actually need to be based in reality. And you can't get that without journalism.
Should I join a cause that wants to outlaw popsicle sticks? Raise taxes on birdwatchers? Require owners of unicycles to register them? How does someone figure out what's a useful cause without actual information?
There's no point in hearing you because you're still espousing ineffective things. You do you, I know what works because I've been doing it for 5 years. The people that taught me were doing it effectively for 40 years. It's not complicated or hard, you just have to you know... actually organize with the appropriate power players.
I can see why advocacy is appealing to you though because you aren't sacrificing anything and allows oneself to be lazy rather than effective.
Donate to your local library.
This is the entire point and purpose of the public library system: aggregating resources to provide accessible information and entertainment for local communities.
Your local library almost certainly has subscriptions to several online and physical news sources. Typically larger libraries have physical newspaper subscriptions from across the country.
If you want to improve accessibility for everyone while still keeping publishers paid, donate to your local library and tell everyone you know about the services they offer. Seriously, we already have a nationwide system to provide access to information that not everyone can afford. We don't need to invent something new and more complicated.
It’s a nice sentiment (librarianship runs in my family) but there are still issues with accessibility for library institutional subscriptions, compared to easily shared links. Relying on institutional subscriptions for revenue isn’t enough for the publishers and journalists. It’s also hard to target donations towards certain parts of the collection; at most libraries almost none of your donation would go towards periodicals.
None of these problems are unsolvable, but typical libraries would need to significantly change their focus and invest in new shared technology first.
I do recommend contacting circulation, reference or technology direction to share your desire to see the library play a larger role in making journalism accessible to the community.
> I wonder if there is a viable business model where for each article, readers can pay to unlock it not just for themselves, but for everyone.
The thing that best approximates what you're asking for and is likely to work (i.e. doesn't need micropayments) is the "free to read" substacks. Anyone can read them, and anyone can pay to subscribe, and if enough people subscribe so that the authors can make rent, they keep writing.
The hardest part about either one is that it requires altruism and then people are often accosted by insufficiently schooled wannabe intellectuals who tell them that being altruistic is irrational. Meanwhile human beings would otherwise intuitively understand that once your basic needs are met, valuing the common good more than personal consumption of hedonistic luxury products is a perfectly rational thing to do, until someone comes along to lecture them on what they should want and try to make them feel stupid for wanting something better.
> I want the whole populace to be informed, even poor people.
> ...I wonder if there is a viable business model where for each article, readers can pay to unlock it not just for themselves, but for everyone.
Propagation is free; quality journalism is premium.
An interesting idea, nonetheless.
However, in the end, I really don't believe any serious article ever moved the needle of an election. The kind of news that actually make people vote is "(identity) of (skin color) killed (another identity) of (another skin color) brutally," not some analysis over the economical consequence of the cease of Fed independence.
I've thought about doing this with software:
"I will write X. Once I have sold $Y worth of licenses, I'll open source it".
Every purchaser is contributing towards the future state of it being open sourced. It balances the needs of developers to need to live and pay bills vs most us wanting to get our code out there. It breaks the monthly recurring revenue model most customers hate. It incentivises early adopters to "invest" by getting early access, but means uncertain just have to wait.
Doing this with articles, books, music, whatever - all sounds pretty cool to be honest. It requires creators to radically transform their human need to maximise revenue from "hits" though.
I really like this idea for a lot of reasons, but especially the last one. It seems like it creates an incentive model that's much closer to rewarding quality investigative journalism rather than the viral junk that ad-driven business models incentivize.
But there is room for it to go wrong, so it would have to be designed carefully. For example it's still vulnerable to the same rage-bait incentive that ad-driven services are, where people decide that articles that make them angry or afraid, or which make their ideological opponents look evil, are more worth spreading (and therefore more worthy of paying to unlock for the crowds).
There's probably no perfect defence against this, but there's at least one option where the kickstarter contract can be structured so that the payments get returned if the article is later found to be factually incorrect in some major aspect. Then at least there's a pull towards truth, even if it's still rage-inducing.
Of course, this model also incentivizes the writing of articles that groups with more buying power are more likely to want to spread, so the wealthier blocs will shape the narrative... but when has the world ever been otherwise.
What if you did like The Guardian, but writ small, and just suggest how much the article is worth after a person read it. Often when I read something really good I have a bit of a high at the end of it, real gratitude for the writer(s) and others who put it together. I wouldn't mind if that feeling was monetized.
Wouldn't we just be reading what people like Musk would want us to read? Or content that makes either extreme of the political spectrum feel passionate? I fear it would drown out little truths and balanced opinions.
> Wouldn't we just be reading what people like Musk would want us to read?
What do you think happens now?
> This would take advantage of human psychology that we like being part of something bigger than ourselves. > And it would hopefully have the emergent property that news that people feel is actually valuable gets spread more widely than useless junk.
There are at least two additional emergent properties:
1. That would essentially put a ceiling on revenue per article.
2. Articles close to the unlock threshold would be much more likely to get funding, opening huge space for manipulation.
Great point and good idea. Maybe something like the Kickstarter model, where you commit to paying something and it only gets deducted if enough people commit?
You'd probably still want to read it straight away rather than wait so you'd pay a small amount for immediate access and commit an additional amount for public access if the threshold is reached. The public commitment could come at the bottom of the article, once you've decided that it's on the public interest.
Counterpoint, you'v just changed publishing incentives. If I write 10 public interest stories, but notice a particular topic is making me more $$, I'll focus in on that.
You could end up with bad actors/PR management types promoting particular stories constantly or to detract from investigation they want less public.
That incentive already exists completely in ad-driven media.
At least this way, readers have a way to vote beyond just what happens to consume their attention and get their eyeballs on ads.
Thanks. I always like putting my ideas out there as I often get feedback on points I hadn't considered.
On this leading to reporting being pushed more towards what people consider in the public interest, I would argue that's a good thing. It's also maybe not that different to the current status quo if you look at how different TV or news networks cater to one target market or another.
With regards to your second point, sounds like you're essentially describing a Sybil attack. I agree with you that that's a serious concern. I'm just going to think aloud here so not sure where I'll end on this but let's see:
1. Having to make a micropayment for each upvote will at least put some cost to the bad actors, cf spam email vs spam SMS. That still makes it more amenable to abuse by the rich but I guess in the end it would come down to the balance of economic power and interest/participation between the masses and the elites?
2. How does it compare to the current model? You pay for a monthly subscription which in this context is an undifferentiated portfolio bundle of the news stories of a particular month. I guess that does make the cost of a Sybil attack higher because you can't just spend on the particular other stories trending at the same time as the one that you are currently trying to bury. For the good actor consumer this means that they generally have to pay for/support a news organisation that is broadly aligned with their interests or ideology. It does create this cliff effect though in that if I don't think I'll read enough stories in a particular month to justify my subscription then I won't pay for it at all.
3. I guess this mirrors the kind of debate and thought that's been going on in decentralized blockchain and web3 circles over the past decade or more about how to structure incentives that create broad distributions of power without too much concentration. I'm not up to speed on that so would love it if someone more knowledgeable would weigh in.
4. I had a thought about tying subscriptions to real world identities of natural persons but I don't like that from a privacy and censorship perspective.
5. I was reminded of Quadratic Voting (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadratic_voting) which I believe would work well if there is a limited set of participants but I think won't protect you from a Sybil attack when it is cheap to create identities.
6. Building on points 5 and 4, what about this? You need a decentralized digital identity in the form of a DID which would have to be signed by some trusted party, either a government or some other institution. This could still be anonymous or pseudononymous in that when you go to the authority to have it signed, the signing authority checks that you currently don't have another active identity or any previous ones have been revoked (potentially problematic as I'm guessing the authority would have to maintain a link and I don't know if that's possible in a zero knowledge way). Alternatively identities are unlimited but expensive to create, say something like $1000 a piece so that creating 1M fake ones at least costs you $1bn. It's yours for life though so you can amortize the cost over time. In order to not cut out people at the bottom of the income distribution, they can use the government signed one but they lose the benefit of anonimity.
7. Once you have something like 6 then maybe QV is a good mechanism for apportioning micropayments on stories in the public interest?
Anyway, would love to know what current SOTA on this is in web3 circles rather than my speculations over my morning coffee.
What about crowdfunding bounties for information to be publicly released? We all have some big questions and I'd gladly pay into them if it worked.
There’s the “unlocking the commons”[0] model used by Tim Carmody and Craig Mod.
[0]: https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/01/unlocking-the-commons/
> Since everyone can vote, I want the whole populace to be informed, even poor people.
So then only rich people get to decide what they make available for free to poor people.
I don't think this is adding anything new to the way the world already works.
That's how it works now. This way regular people have some say instead of no say.
that is an incredible idea and i would support you with code should you or anyone else decide to make that happen
That seems like a really great idea.
That would incentivize locking important things behind paywalls.
Elon musk and Peter Thiel will just pay for all the conspiracy theories.
> Let's say a journalist writes an excellent article about something political of serious import. I'm fine with paying for that article to get access to it.
Ignoring the millionaire angle of just paying for salaries, we sort of already have that. It's the algorithm of whatever platform a person is on. The net result is people focusing on things that get the most eyeballs.
The problem with your vision is literally what you are saying:
> I'm fine with paying for that article
Sure. But what about the one before that? And the one after that? Articles that don't meet your standards that you would say you are fine paying for.
It's like asking to pay a programmer per line of code that goes into the actual final build.
Unit tests? Nope. Integration tests? Nada. Comments? Nope. Documentation? Are users paying for it? No? No way!
This sounds ridiculous because it is.
And you already work this way. You lump stuff people don't care about with stuff people do care about and combine them.
It's the old joke about paying by the hour vs. by the project, and how you aren't paying for the 15 minutes of work it takes an expert to do something, but for the 20 years of experience that allow them to do it in 15 minutes.
> I wonder if there is a viable business model where for each article, readers can pay to unlock it not just for themselves, but for everyone. The price would obviously have to be higher since you aren't just buying it for yourself. But perhaps the sense of "I'm helping build a better-informed world and helping broadcast my values" would encourage people to pay that higher price.
I think that could work in a way. I think it's a bit more involved than just buying an article.
Back of the comment thinking here: you see an article you like, you buy a year subscription. This signals that sometimes articles take longer to write, that the person writing that article can't write good articles if they are stressed, and that they avoid having to only ever chase trends.
Then, by having that sub, you have votes. These are effectively "tipping" with your subscription. You don't pay more; you just signal that you want this article to be free. If enough people "tip" on this article, it goes free.
Does this work? I don't know. I feel like in this case, it's low enough to be feasible but not too low as to diminish the work. I think people who claim they are willing to pay for the article will show their true colors and balk at the price. Ignoring that the article is more than just the lines of text and the time it took to type it out.
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.
The irritating thing to me here is that I actually don't mind the concept of advertising. Mostly it's the implementation. Newspaper ads don't bug me one bit, because they're not physically capable of moving, animating, dancing, and trying to get my attention. They're not physically capable of tracking my habits and reporting them back to the mothership. They're just... there. Passive. Occasionally interesting, or at least pleasantly designed.
If internet advertising was more like newspaper advertising, I wouldn't feel quite so compelled to go out of my way to block it. But no, someone somewhere along the way decided it had to be actively distracting, and track those impressions, and the industry just can't help itself. It's rotten to the core.
They didn't bug me in the 90s but 3 decades of deeply annoying internet ads have kinda made me allergic to them.
I don't think I'll ever stop using an adblocker. Even if ads would become less annoying or if it would become illegal to use an adblocker or something.
100% agree!
The other day I was thinking how pleasant it was to read a newspaper (26 years ago) compared to reading the news online today.
With a newspaper, the paragraph you are currently reading doesn't suddenly jump out of view just because some ad finally loaded or was replaced by a different sized ad. The ads were static and so inoffensive back then, but they still made the newspapers lots of money.
There are downsides to newspapers, of course: they are unwieldy on the train, they kill trees, and they get out-of-date really fast.
If some decent publication could replicate the good parts of a newspaper for a modern tablet device ($0.50 or whatever per issue, the ads are static images and never replaced after the page is loaded, and no jumping content), I think I would pay.
It's more expensive than you suggest you are looking for, but the financial times does this pretty well.
Magazines on the other hand could get annoying, especially with the scratch-n-sniff perfume/cologne ads.
Otherwise, I agree with the bad thing about ads is adTech and not ads themselves. The internet just allowed our worst selves to run rampant with the obvious result coming to fruition.
I don't know, man, glossy magazine ads were glamorous. sure there was stupid stuff, but the comparison between the "one weird trick" era and magazine ads of someone looking cool so you have a positive impression with some brand name is pretty stark.
Anyone who visited a Wendy's in the 1980s or 1990s knows that newspaper ads can also make for interesting tabletop decorations
You gotta punch the monkey though! Isn’t that fun?!
But no, that is how we got here. Internet ads were novel until they were just irritating.
But do you think the concept of advertising is the best solution to the problem it tries to solve? I have serious doubts.
Sure, 100 years ago you had no other way to make something known, but today with everybody having a smartphone there might be other ways. I always would like to see reviews of stuff from my immediate network of friends (or, let's say 2-3 connections) - wouldn't that be much better? Of course, the whole ad industry will have zero interest to promote something like this, where they loose control and the process might be actually efficient.
Sorta depends on how you define the concept. A sign on the side of a storefront is definitely marketing. If I walk into a department store, every product on the shelf is wrapped in advertising, from its packaging to the brand name to the picture of what the product is for. When I visit Amazon, and start searching for something to buy, every single thing that comes up could be thought of as an ad for itself, since otherwise I wouldn't be able to find it in the first place.
These are contextually relevant ads. Of course they are, right? The task is buying stuff. That's the time, and the place. The best time, really. My wallet is out and I'm ready to go with the purchase.
If it's a little hard for me to discover that a product exists, so that I know to seek it out, I think that's okay. We could do with more curation and less firehose-of-attention in that department. Needing to coordinate those sponsorships ahead of time should act as a stronger filter. The newspaper knowing which ad it is running alongside today's article might not have been such a bad idea. The ones that cheapen out and print nonsense damage their reputation in the process, right?
Why would ads go away just because you pay? Print newspapers and magazines have had ads forever and they cost money. Even expensive glossy magazines like National Geographic have full page ads, half page ads, etc.
There is no natural law that ads will go away. Ads will only disappear if their presence would make the company lose more customers than they gain on ads. Ads make them money. If people don't mind it so much to abandon the service/website, there will be ads. Publications are businesses and want to maximize profits. They don't just want to cover some fixed ongoing costs, like hosting and journalist salaries. As a business they use the available tools to make more profits. There is no "enough" in business.
Exactly, we see this play out clearly with streaming apps. Disney sells a subscription to remove ads, then one day they change their mind and now you only see “less ads” and they introduce an even more expensive plan that removes ads. The behavior should be criminal yet every major streaming app does this.
These companies like to pretend ads are the pro-consumer approach when in reality they’d much rather scale through advertising than anything else. They get to increase revenue without touching acquisition cost. The only loser is the poor chump trying to watch their favorite TV show.
Prime is worse.
Pay for the service. Then pay more to remove ads. But then a massive amount of their catalog remains “only with ads.” And then they pack half the usable screen with media that must be bought and titles that require add-on subscriptions.
It’s a real cesspool.
Hulu does a lot of this garbage too, but not quite as obnoxiously.
I feel like the less tolerance I have for ads (as time goes on), the more desperate they get in trying increasingly aggressive ways of making you watch ads. I'm never watching ads again, ever! I'm willing to pay, but not with my time for your terrible, horrendous, bullshit ads!
True, but also, businesses have used "coupons" for a long time. I saw one article where this was described as "selling the same product at multiple tiers".
eg. if you're rich, you don't bother with coupons (in general) - your time is more valuable than clipping the coupon and remembering to take it. if you're middle class, you use the coupon to feel like you're getting a deal, but if you forget, oh well. if you're lower class, you wait for a sale and then use the coupon to be able to afford it at all.
Similar with ads - if you won't let me access your site without showing me ads (even with an adblocker) - I really don't need your product that badly. Sell to those who have a lot of spare attention or willpower to look past your ads.
I don't mean I click on ads - EVER - but they're distracting. VERY distracting. I mean, the few times I've had to use yahoo mail from a browser without an ad blocker, it was an unbelievably bad experience. (yes, I still use yahoo. I got at least one of those accounts right around the time "BackRub" was renamed "Google")
When people are trying to justify ads, they often lean on "our servers cost $X per month and we have Y journalists paid $Z per month, therefore we need revenue from ads" which makes it sound like they need to raise a fixed, finite amount.
That sounds much more persuasive than "our billionaire owner paid a lot of money for this for-profit business, and he'd really like a return on his investment"
But you're right, of course - the fact someone pays a lot of money for something doesn't mean it won't be plastered with tawdry ads.
I don't mind sponsored ads that are mostly static inside the video or text. Also if creators accept sponsors that are too bad their reputation might be affected.
The only thing that can be in some cases it's influencing the content and the creator not providing genuine content because conflict of interest
A particular aspect of the discussion is also: What makes you trust that once micropayments are around ads will stop? Look at other services, like Netflix for example. They will happily have you pay and show you ads if they feel they can get away with it.
I am not at all against paying for journalism (I already do in many ways), but IMO, it would be best if there was a way to pay money to one place and then have it go to all journalistic media that deserves that name and has a track record of not being factually wrong multiple times per day.
Thinking about how journalism ought to be payed in this day and age also means to think about what kind of journalism we want to incentivise and which one we want to disincentivise. What we need is the kind that is factually correct and a check to the most wealthy and powerful people, organisations, companies and countries on earth. What we don't need is the kind that is captured by exactly those people, the kind that bends reality to stoke the lowest impulses etc.
With this in mind, we should think about how to design a incentive structure that makes that result benefitial, while all others are unsupported.
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.
Well, people legitimately hated banner ads and pop-ups. When I get linked to some small news publisher I'm often reading the article between these giant ads, sometimes I don't realize there's actually more content to an article because the ads take up so much space! I typically close those sites out and try to find what I'm looking for elsewhere.
I think that most people don't really care about tracking, but the fact that often ads make their experience miserable.
You open a link, you get a full screen ad, and have to wait 10 seconds or more. When you finally can close the ad, a popup appears asking if you want to subscribe to their newsletter. you close that too. A cookie banner reminds you that they care about your privacy, that's why they share your details with 1000+ partners. When you find the hidden button to say that you don't accept finally the article appears, but the bottom half is occupied by an overlay with a video ad. All the while the page scrolls terribly because of the amount of javascript loaded.
Or, sometimes, you get ad, cookie banner and then they tell you that you have to pay to access the content.
I suspect that if people had to choose between ads without tracking and tracking without the ads, they would choose the latter.
This is exactly my problem with ads. They've turned into a spying mechanism that eats my battery, bandwidth, and privacy. Not only do the ad platforms want to track me but then sell their data to an innumerate number of "partners". I have no control or influence over how any of the data is used. I also have no meaningful way to opt out.
Clicking a link on the web is not tacit permission to endlessly surveil me. Viewing a blog post is not informed consent to be tracked. Even a cookie banner isn't informed consent.
While I never enjoyed magazine or television ads I never minded them. Some were even useful and introduced me to a product I ended up wanting/needing. They also didn't track me all over the web. I don't mind ads, I do mind surveillance.
When I had my first smartphone I had dataplan for 500mb per month and that was enough to read news sites. That’s impossible now.
Feels like there's an opportunity for an "ethical ads" platform
For a few years in the webcomic & blog space there was Ryan North's Project Wonderful, which served unintrusive auctioned banner ads that were usually advertising another creator's genuinely interesting work; I have no problem at all seeing ads for things sincerely made by humans.
Mozilla tried this. But the only people who want this is consumers. Advertisers want as much info as possible to target ads so would never choose this option unless heavily pressured by consumers.
Founder of EthicalAds here. In my view, this is only partially true and publishers (sites that show ads) have choices here but their power is dispersed. Advertisers will run advertising as long as it works and they will pay an amount commensurate with how well it works. If a publisher chooses to run ads without tracking, whether that's a network like ours or just buyout-the-site-this-month sponsorships, they have options as long as their audience generates value for advertisers.
That said, we 100% don't land some advertisers when they learn they can't run 3rd party tracking or even 3rd party verification.
There is a platform called ethical ads for developer focused advertising: https://www.ethicalads.io/
does Google AdWords still exist? text only ads solves a lot of these issues
My favorite forum has ads on every page. One header and one footer. Text only as a link to the site or product being advertised. The advertisers pay the site owner himself.
I've bought things from those ads because they're targeting the demographic on that site, not targeting me specifically. They're actually more relevant.
Now that's not probably sustainable, but I have to imagine that the roi for the advertisers is higher than general targeted ads. I've never even clicked on one of those except by accident.
I don't understand why more companies don't do contextual ads, yeah. Why track users all around the web when you can go to a website about cars and put in car ads, or a website about music and sell concert tickets or etc? You already know everyone on that website is interested in the topic, and the analytics would be much cheaper this way.
They absolutely do. Every sponsorship you see on a podcast or a youtube video or a streamer is a contextual ad. Many open source sponsorships are actually a form of marketing. You could argue that search ads are pretty contextual although there's more at work there. Every ad in a physical magazine is a contextual ad. Physical billboards take into account a lot of geographical context: the ads you see driving in LA are very different than the ones you see in the Bay Area. Ads on platforms like Amazon, HomeDepot, etc. are highly contextual and based on search terms.
Oxymoron
Not only news giants need revenue. Everyone producing news needs it, including any hoped-for smaller, more democratised new entrants to the industry.
Where will that revenue come from?
Should we expect high-quality journalism for free?
Should people expect high quality journalism if revenue is based on the number of views?
Good journalism costs money, people should expect to pay.
Though I'd point out that publishing news is now cheaper than ever, and people were more than willing to pay for access before, so why shouldn't they be willing to pay less now?
Or perhaps more to the point, why are they _not_ willing to pay now? And is the reason something ad-based perhaps?
I interpreted your original post to mean that you found none of micropayments, ads or subscriptions to be acceptable. Now I have the impression that I misinterpreted you -- but I still can't tell what kind(s) of payment you would actually find acceptable.
What kind(s) of payment would you find acceptable?
My preference would be free, single payment, subscription. Probably in that order.
I don't mind micropayments as a _method_ to achieve any of those, but I don't like them as a replacement for ads. And I don't accept the premise that ads should be replaced with something similar.
Thanks. By "single payment", do you mean one payment for lifetime access? I'm aware of a personal cloud storage provider that offers this, but I don't think it could work for news.
Those are not mutually exclusive. You can have a site that requires a subscription, includes ads, and requires a micropayment for each article read.
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!
Demanding your friends engage in a financial transaction with a third party is a different vibe. The reality of what would actually happen is this: if I can’t read it, I can’t read it. If I ask and they’re willing to provide it, then I’ll read it, and I would do the same with them.
But the truth is, that would grate on people, and not just with me and mine, but for everyone if we all had to engage in financial transactions to read the links that are shared with us or posted on the web. So people would just stop sharing links. I’d think twice before sending someone a link, and others would as well. We’d probably just swap to copying the whole article in another form and sharing that instead, but the extra steps would reduce the amount we would be willing to share over time cuz trading PDFs we have to generate ourselves is not as much fun as trading links.
There is some publications that manage this by letting paying person to share it and the other person can see it too
I subscribe to a couple of these already. :) It’s not micro-transactions though, it’s a feature built off a subscriber-provider relationship.
What if the sender covered the micro transaction on the behalf of the receiver? People might be more inclined to send what they see as micro-gifts, rather than micro-obligations.
Are you assuming the current landscape where engaging in a financial transaction, even if only for $0.01, is a tedious and unquantifiably dangerous gambit? (Sale of your info, leaking of your info, dark pattern subscription TOS's, etc.)
Or would you still hold your opinions even in a theoretical landscape where paying $0.01 is just consenting to that amount being deducted from your bank account, with no friction or danger?
If I could EASILY click "yes" to say, pay $0.01 from a pre-filled anonymous wallet that I have to manually refill (say, in $10 increments) and there's no way to hack payment information in any way, OR to figure out what info I've paid for, that would help a LOT.
Of course, they would probably have to accept visa gift cards paid for in cash for this to actually be truly anonymous. I mean sure, I have nothing nefarious to hide - but who is to say what the current administration will decide is nefarious tomorrow? Reading too many NY Times articles, and not enough National Review articles? "You are in violation of the internet news fairness doctrine"...
Indeed this is what I was getting at. I think you're far from the only one whose market behavior would change given such technology.
This is somewhat ironic to me, given that I normally despise everything about fintech. But this seems like a product/practice that could actually change the world for the better. The closest we have is crypto wallets and that's far from perfect.
Yeah, I wouldn't touch ANYTHING from current fintech with a 100 foot pole.
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My stance is exactly what I said: most news is priced correctly for most people at $0.00.
If they value it at more than that, they will pay for it.
Then I don't understand the bitter line in the sand you've drawn between $0.00 and $0.0001. You could spend a whole lifetime paying this latter amount multiple times per day, and it would cost you about as much as a box of bandaids.
If you really value the information contained in these articles at $0.00, then neither would you spend that much more valuable resource—time—in order to digest it, even if it were given to you for free.
So I don't think you're hung up about the actual financial cost in this analysis. You're either like most people, who simply don't want to deal with the rigmarole of patiently providing payment info to a hundred different vendors who will act irresponsibly with your data, or you have some purely symbolic and emotional connection to the notion that you're providing exactly zero dollars and zero cents to your enemies.
The vast majority of the time that I read the news, it’s from a publication I pay for. They get far far more than a box of bandaids over a lifetime.
The rest can be worth my time, sometimes, under limited circumstances, but usually it isn’t. Like who here can say that all of the links they’ve clicked on throughout their lifetime have been valuable, and haven’t just been time wasters?
If you put a financial cost on links though, people just won’t pay. And they won’t click links. We might waste less time too, but just because something got my time doesn’t mean I’m going to also give it money for having had the privilege of my time.
> Like who here can say that all of the links they’ve clicked on throughout their lifetime have been valuable, and haven’t just been time wasters?
Certainly many of them are time wasters! But before you've clicked on these links, I should think they are best modeled as a random variable payout (P) as measured against the monetary (M) and temporal (T) cost of clicking and reading through them. If the expected value calculation doesn't work out (E(P) < E(M) + E(T)), this is when I say nope and don't click. If it does work out, then it works out in such a way that there is at least some very small micropayment value ε > 0 that I would (in a ideal and frictionless environment) also be willing to endure on top of the temporal cost.
What most "free" content providers decided to converge on in order to extract epsilons from consumers so that they can continue to do business is ads, rather than honest micropayments.
I would be fine with most businesses that rely on ad revenue burning to the ground. And there are a few businesses that I will go far out of my way to patronize with more-than-a-box-of-bandaids. But for the majority of the free content providers that are not steaming garbage, but are also not in the privileged group of content providers that I deeply approve of and consciously think about, then in a frictionless environment I think I would prefer that they survive off rationally priced micropayments rather than be forced into the ad circus.
> rationally priced micropayments rather than be forced into the ad circus
And when the rational price is zero, or rounds down to zero, they won’t survive either way, even with the magic fintech of your fantasies.
If something is worth paying for, then pay for it. People don’t want to pay because the real value of most news to them is actually just $0.00. Making the fraction of a penny small enough while somehow dodging all the middlemen that want their cut might get a few charitable folks on board, but it won’t replace ads, subscriptions, or anything else a news org can do to sustain its business model. It’s not about how small and frictionless you can make the cost to potentially charitable individuals, it’s about convincing them that it is worth doing at all when they already either pay nothing because it’s worth nothing to them or pay a lot because it’s worth a lot to them. The middle ground is where ads and free newsletters live.
I price most news sites at negative value.
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.
He is because they make money from ads.
I wouldn't pay .000001 cents either. If they did charge this way the amount of generated clickbait titles would surpass anything we've seen before. At least now they have to backup the clickbait title with content that causes you to stay longer for more ads with micropayments they already took your money.
New micro payment scheme that charges .000001 cents every time you page down. Like the old listicles that make you click into a new page for every number, but instead you have your credit card tied to your scroll wheel.
There are articles that have changed my outlook and life so much that months, years, decades later I would value them in the thousands.
They didn't change most people's life, though, and/or most people's lives were changed by other articles. Publishers cannot meaningfully price-discriminate on this basis. The closest version is republishing a longer version as a book.
So, consumers are left with some amount of surplus. The horror.
Did you go on to write checks in the thousands to the writers or publications that produced them?
Worse than that, what was the percentage of these amazing articles?
Completely disagree that news is already priced appropriately for the value it delivers to people. I dont pay for the news I read because its not valued at $10 a month for me but I still do value it. For me $2 a month is what i value it but since they dont offer that as an option I cant pay. If you're to broke to click on a link because it might cost 0.0001 cent just say so. Maybe your friends can give you a cent so you can read news for the rest of your days.
$2/month or $10/momth is apparently not the actual price then if you’re able to get it for $0/month.
Most people are not paying per call or paying anything. If the goal is to reduce half a million readers to a core group of thousands who will pay then this idea might work.
This is me w Google Gemini. And you're right: it does change your outlook on micropayments, which in my case, are API calls. My costs for the last few days: 3 cents, 2 cents, 46 cents. Believe it or not, every one of those calls was scrutinized and justified.
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.
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?
The solution is called centralization by a middle man that takes a massive cut - eg YouTube Premium. Only Google makes real money off that, and the content creators rely on sponsors instead for their own revenue. So does it really work? I would despise a future where we solve micro transactions by giving up control to yet-another unnecessary body. Especially not even at the level of Visa or Mastercard, despite how much I dislike crypto.
No, that is absolutely 100% not micropayments, as the consumer is not paying per view/article/video whatever. They're paying a fixed fee and are not metered.
Good to know. Now I think I know why micropayments for news media never took off: because people who want to read news media probably don't want to waste mental cycles on keeping track of a micropayments account. They want a set-and-forget solution with a predictable cost. If micropayments can't fit those expectations, then the market probably wants something other than the thing we're calling micropayments.
Goes like the following: Google/YouTube have a userbase to track accounts for; they go to a bank (licensed money transmitter, with OFAC/KYC/AML programs implemented). Google gets paid by people looking to advertise, and that money goes into Google's master account. Google's finance system translates views/impressions to money movements to creator accounts hosted at other banks (same deal, OFAC/KYC/AML program in place). The main thing is, every party that actually moves around money, operates in such a way that the entire transaction chain is followable. It's not point to point, it's hub and spoke. The hubs keep track of everything to keep the Osama Bin Laden's or Russian Oligarch's, or Cuban nationals out of the U.S. financial system.
"Micropayments" have always been something different. We technologists just figured there would be a way we could whip up some accounting software, or a spec, and allow people a way to store and transact without relying on a custodial holder, with all the extra regulation burden. Point is though, government and law enforcement don't want that, because with that, it becomes a great deal more difficult to follow the money, or to get away with things like mandating everyone report money movements over some amount to the tax authority; something easy to do when it's tacked on to the condition of maintaining your license to do business. Every money transmitter being well behaved and integrated with the state maximizes the risk for anyone attempting to utilize the financial system for illegal activity.
Ergo... What you think of as already solved isn't "micropayments". It's traditional finance in the U.S. What we refer to when we say Micropayments, is a way to store value, maintain accounts, and run point to point transactions "blessed" or recognized by the world et al without an intermediary.
> The hubs keep track of everything to keep the Osama Bin Laden's or Russian Oligarch's, or Cuban nationals out of the U.S. financial system.
Yeah I don't think that worked:
https://marker.medium.com/how-russian-oligarchs-stow-away-th...
Nope! That's the fun part! All the misery from the downsides, none of the upside! But imagine how much worse it could be! /s
There's a reason I'm doing anything possible to avoid going back into finance. I never developed the knack to just sit back quietly doing stupid things that don't work for the purpose everyone says it's for.
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).
That's called starting a bank, or financial services company, and lots of places do it, but the bar to do so, and remain able to do so is fairly high. The margins, however, are exquisite. The middlemen eat fat off the percent they skim off the top.
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!)
As mentioned above, it's not a micropayment. It's just a payment. You can transact in whatever amounts you want, and backend systems will bump the numbers around just fine, even for fractions of a cent. Hell, that's how interest and currency exchange settle out. The LLM provider runs a meter. The meter tallies your activity, wraps it in a transaction, hands it to the backend, backend talks to other banks/payment gateways, an ACH happens, done. That isn't a "micropayment". That's just a payment. In fact, if you pay attention, some of the biggest winners in tech, namely cloud providers or AI providers, are as darling as they are because they figured out how to turn everyday compute tasks into billable transactions. We're exceptionally good at tracking the build up of value, even if your atomic unit of transaction is a thousandth of a cent, but x however many million customers you have, it quickly adds up.
Micropayments have always, as long as I've been in the industry, implied a level of disintermediation on the behalf of sender/receiver. The chance to have that kind of utility died September 11th, 2001, when the U.S. and western world suddenly got the bright idea that the only way to protect themselves from terrorists was to modify the system to be able to surveil everybody l, all at once. Bringing us to a codger explaining why P2P micropayments are pretty much a pipedream in the finance world as she is legally practiced.
Not too interested in debating the semantics of "micropayment", but it sounds like if we swap in "news sites" in place of "LLM providers" everything should still still be possible? Consumers could pay tiny amounts of money for individual articles?
You already can with traditional finance. The only thing stopping that from being the case is that the news orgs don't want to sell their product that way, and you can't force them to. That's kind of a them thing. They get to dictate their terms, you don't like them, that's fine. Their answer would be you aren't their target demographic. Besides which, do you really want to create an arrangement by which someone sneaking in an XSS driven script will drive your browser to visit their entire catalog, and piping the content to /dev/null or similar, you getting charged for every GET?
The technical possibility is there. The desire to operate the business that way is not. You're a victim of the conspicuously absent feature implementation, and all I can say is... Well... Welcome to the club. Here's your "Fuck MBAs" hat, and an Occupy Wall Street T-Shirt, because the perpetrators inflicting your suffering all pretty much as a whole wear suits.
Would love to hear about some of those reality checks. Note: I'm not currently in favor of micropayments, but am willing to listen.
Well, there's OFAC, for one. In the U.S. alphabet soup, that's the Office of Foreign Asset Control, and they maintain the master sanctions list operated by the Federal government. This is a list, that as a matter of law, must be checked against every transaction. If there is a match on the receiving end of funds to a sanctioned individual, the transaction is immediately halted. If a sanctioned party is the originator, a flag may be raised for the institution to deal with otherwise. You do not want to end up on that list, because if you do, the U.S. financial system turns into a roach motel. Assets flow into the custodianship of the service provider, but are unable to move out. A very highly controversial feature to have implemented if I dare say so myself. Then there are the SAR's and CTR's, which are reports that must be filed by banks in the event of "suspicious activity". I.e. structuring, withdrawal of large amounts of cash, etc. They are specifically prohibited from informing you as a customer about these processes.
Then there's the risk department integration. It is mandatory to hand over transaction information on request by law enforcement. The process is mandatory, and continued licensure is conditional on maintaining a program through which financial surveillance can be conducted by the State.
Now, are these features inherently bad? No. Not at first blush. Do they have the potential to become horrifying? Well... Look at what happened to the ICC judge who got added to the sanctioned entities list. It doesn't just effect bank accounts. It involves anything that you engage in a digital transaction to maintain access to. That means entire sectors suddenly go from situation normal, to persona non grata, your business is not welcome here, at threat of massive fines for doing business with a sanctioned entity.
I went into finance looking for a boring, uncontroversial line of work, and came out after a few years realizing the entire sector is so damn wired for power projection it's not even funny. Once you see it and understand how the bounds of what you can do are constrained by these people who are authorized to digitally transact on your behalf... Well... It can't really be unseen.
Thanks. As someone who has lived in 3 countries (2 as an adult) and is considering leaving the US again.. Any hints on how NOT to end up on that list? I.e. avoid large transfers? What's the best way to transfer some $$ out of the US? I have no red flags in my background other than some speeding tickets 10+ years ago and have dual citizenship.
How far does this extend? I read the ICC judge had her credit cards canceled - which would be bad, but, has she been prevented from just going to her bank / withdrawing funds / writing a cheque to pay for her bills? Which western countries are more / less integrated into this?
Don't want to end up on the Sanctioned Entity List? Avoid anything that might make you controversial to a Federal Bureaucrat, and never do business with or on behalf of anyone already on the list. That's pretty much the only criteria to get on it. It's considered to be under the auspices of "Foreign Policy" so is under the sole discretion of the Federal Executive.
A few years ago, I'd tell you if it's a NATO ally, odds are at some point they are wired into OFAC. The choice is, do business with the American financial system, or get added to the sanctioned. There's a reason why I said the American Financial system is wired for soft power projection. We were big and trustworthy enough where just going along with it to maintain access to things made the act of checking a list that thusfar, no one had too many objections to the people who ended up getting added to it was just a no brainer.
Then... an ICC judge got sanctioned, finally making apparent how the U.S. really intended the mechanism to be used; as an "our way, or the highway" sort of thing. So I'm far from able to make any informed guesses on who is still honoring the commitment or not. The Cheeto-in-Chief has done a marvelous job at encouraging everyone to reassess the longevity or reliability of Pax Americana, sooo...
As for how to move assets out? If you aren't on the list, just move em somewhere else. Just not to anywhere on the list. If you are on the list, kiss your assets custodially held goodbye til the ole' U.S. of A decides to take you off the list, which at a minimum is probably going to require some very uncomfortable chats with people you don't want to be alone with.
Again, there is a reason I left. There is a reason I have no desire to return, and why I've basically opted to live life extra hard mode, because I can't just accept that it's okay for the Government to orchestrate financial lockout; and even less reason why we should all be gungho to implement systems like that. Canada has one, I'm pretty sure Great Britain and most of Europe each probably maintain their own as well. You'd have to check. I understand why a country would seek to have one, and operate one. I just can't consciably be involved in it. The abuse potential of the capability is too damn high. "Good guys in office who wouldn't be stupid enough to abuse such a thing" cannot be said to be a given. I wasn't comfortable with the Orange Man sitting on the nuclear football, nor am I comfortable with him on OFAC or anything else his position now entitles him too.
If I sound like a paranoid nutter, I sympathize, sounds pretty fantastic right? I once thought the same thing about a guy who used to work for the Postal Service who tried to tell me that "Oh, hell no, USPS will absolutely open main in transit for a myriad of reasons. At the time, I took it with a grain of salt. Now... I realize he was absolutely telling the truth. If it's a network, we (the U.S.) will do everything in our power to maintain the ability to tap, manipulate, and control it. I just want help machines move bits from A to B man. Not be a cog in sovereign theft/freezing of assets of the politically/diplomatically inconvenient/disfavored. Violates the Moral Imperative.
Here's the lists btw. Enjoy.
https://sanctionssearch.ofac.treas.gov/
Was really the first time in my life I started looking at and appreciating databases as the weapons they are.
If only there was some sort of alternate monetary system based on cryptography that enabled instant micro payments.
Using a public ledger, that is just surveilled and treated as prosecution futures, or targeting for kidnappers. Yes, we know. It's also got major usability issues, and tends to end up in practice defaulting to a centralized custodial model anyways for the vast majority of users. Where it can't, the onramps to convert to the currency of the land are outlawed.
Still would work for the use case.
I think a token system where $10 gets you 1,000 tokens and each read is logged and costs 1-5 tokens, depending on severity of the news and its age, is a great idea.
Who determines severity? What about investigations that take months or years to produce, who counts how many more tokens they should cost compared with a news story about Trump's latest tweet? Do you get a popup asking if you want to pay x tokens for each link?
Journalism micropayments have been tried many times before, and never worked. Things haven't substantially changed in the meantime, so what would be different this time? I'm genuinely curious, I'm a journalist, so I'd really love to find a working funding model for quality media.
Readers who payed (and only those) could vote on a scale whether the article was worth the payment? The amount payed might even be calculated into the vote, e.g. you payed one token and get one vote, I payed two or three tokens and get two votes.
And for those long investigation stories, you can sell the series cheaper up front and give access to all the stories related to that case. Or nickel and dime each post.
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.
The in-world items you could buy in Second Life two decades ago using Linden dollars were arguably a successful use case for micropayments.
You could buy and sell virtual items with a real-world cost far smaller than the transaction fees of a regular card transaction.
Speaking of which - that, to my mind, is the definition of a micropayment - a payment too small to be practical to administer using existing card payment infrastructure. So-called "micropayments" in games have long since ceased to qualify under that definition - they're just "transactions" now.
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.
You can't pay $.001 to $0.05 to get someone to do actual reporting.
How much is an ad impression worth on your local paper?
I don't know -- but I'm a paid subscriber to 4 newspapers.
I would love the option for pay for usage for many products I am forced into paying a subscription for.
I think one legitimate difficulty with micropayments for a news site (that has a few options to solve) is the reservation price of most readers for a single article might be lower than the cost of handling the transaction. The best option I can think of is the user needs to add credit their account or a credit card or something, which isn’t uncommon but I think some people might see it as a grift where they pay for more than they’re initially getting.
I think one benefit of it or shortcomings is it’ll probably kill off portions with smaller readership, but if that’s not you -you’re no longer paying for something you weren’t reading.
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.
Thank you for responding to the actual article rather than (like many others here) going straight to pre-cooked talking points on micropayments.
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.
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
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.
"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.
> "reading this might be interesting"
I find it hard to take this objection seriously, since almost everything that isn't a physical commodity has some degree of "I don't know if I'm satisfied with this yet". Books and movies clearly do. But we expect to take a risk and occasionally pay for them, and it feels ordinary to do so -- so why not here?
I don't object at all to people not liking micropayments -- I don't like them either. But the reason I don't like them is because I'm accustomed to getting good quality content for free, and no other reason.
With books, movies, tv shows, music almost everyone is discovering based on recommendations or curation. Very few people are consuming much of that type of content with no outside input on its quality or interest. News is almost always a blind link with just a headline to work from.
The headline is a pretty big clue about what's going to be in the article, I think. (Though maybe headlines will become more coy, to entice readers to pay for the full article? We already see this with questions-as-headlines.)
Most of the news I read comes from the same handful of familiar sites, so I have a good idea of what I'm going to get, especially if they include an author byline and I recognise it. "Niche" news sites would do well to continue offering a small number of freebie articles to entice those who chafe at the thought of spending $0.40 on something they're Not Completely Certain Is Really Worth It.
It's a clue of what its about but it's not the same as a recommendation that its going to contain something you enjoy.
So every click is a decision on an unknown and that's where the problem comes in. You read the headline now you have a decision to make, is it worth spending money to continue. For longer form media your return on good stuff is going to be at least an hour of entertainment. For news you will almost certainly be done the article in 30 seconds on less. So you decide to click, you read the article, it's good, it's now 30 seconds later and you read the next headline and you have another decision to make, do I pay for this? Thats where the decision fatigue comes in and why it's so quick with this model. Even if it's just a penny you're not thinking well clicking this will only cost a penny, you're thinking do I really want to pay to see what the other side says?
And if you're at the point where you're spending a lot of time on a single source even if it costs more it generally makes more sense just to subscribe since then you are making a single decision once a month.
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.
It isn't with news though. I am a bit of a news junkie and have actually subscribed to multiple news sources over the past year and I can't name a single journalist from any of them and I am almost certainly average in that way.
absolutely, the problem of the cognitive friction of having to decide what to pay for compounds massively when there uncertainty about the purchase, and the negative experience when the user feels that he or she has been essentially scammed because the purchased product is not what was expected far outweighs positive experiences that are perceived at best as just the expected transaction
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.
With a movie rental I'm paying $5-30 for a 1-2 hour experience where I have some idea going in of what I'm getting thanks to trailers and I'm making that decision maybe once a fortnight if that.
The scale of the decisions doesn't align.
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".
How do you explain public utilities? No one has any issue with the fact that flicking a light switch in your home is technically a micropayment, as it consumes extra electricity that comes out in your monthly bill.
I would venture to say that what consumers don't like about micropayments is any combination of the following:
(1) It's a pain in the ass to provide payment info most places, and comes with the looming paranoia that your data is going to be abused;
(2) It's viscerally disgusting when e.g. AAA video game developers expect you not to notice the difference between $100 for marginal extra content, and 100 micropayment charges of $1 for the same amount of marginal extra content;
(3) It's an infohazard to the average person to inform them exactly how much they're spending on each thing in their life, because it tempts them toward a culturally validated budgetary anorexia.
Public utilities avoid (1) because it's a one-time signup with trusted vendors for years of service, they avoid (2) because utilities are priced (somewhat) rationally in nationally standardized ways, and they avoid (3) because utility bills can only get so itemized.
It's also the incentive structure that's different. E.g. I can choose to buy cheaper LED lights to reduce my electricity costs because the interests of lightbulb companies are mostly orthogonal to the (usage-based) interests of the utility providers.
Micro-payments are more akin to a hypothetical world in which the lightbulb company gets paid via my electricity bill; now they have an incentive to sell incandescents over LEDs. Similar to how micro-payment (and advertising) based news companies have an incentive to sell click-bait, because they're getting paid based on usage rather than a flat fee.
This seems like a problem of perverse incentives independent of the medium of micropayment (cash vs. ad farming), no? I suppose the only way around that particular problem would be to decouple their revenue from the number of people actually accessing their content, which as far as I can tell precludes those people being the patrons. Instead the patron would be some larger corporate or public body auditing and funding them based on merit.
Curiously, there are still perverse incentives even in the case of lightbulbs and other consumable goods or technologies: planned obsolescence, delay of technology upgrades, and deliberate backroom deals from associated resource providers.
Yes! You can partially decouple it through recurring subscriptions, or possibly bundling, such as cable TV. But I can't think of a viable micro-payment method that wouldn't have the same problem.
Planned obsolescence is a failure mode because unit consumption (vs metered consumption) is the monetization scheme. Hypothetically this could be decoupled through something like lifetime warranties, but that has too many failure modes to be broadly viable.
The point is, despite other perverse incentives, with lightbulbs you have a situation in which unit consumption and metered consumption are at odds, so one company can make more money by enabling the customer to spend less elsewhere. Of course, if you ever tie the two together, such that one company profits from metered consumption and controls/profits from the unit -- Inkjet printers with proprietary cartridges come to mind -- you've now adopted an anti-consumer business model.
It's ideal when corporate incentives end up opposed to each other for the benefit of the consumer, but I think you'll be hard pressed to create that through micro-payments.
Is usage based billing the same as micropayments? In any case, I have one utility company with lines connected to my house, so I put up with whatever they want to bill me. Very different marketplace than news papers.
> I have one utility company with lines connected to my house, so I put up with whatever they want to bill me. Very different marketplace than news papers.
Fair point. I suppose I'm considering the alternative scenario where rather than near-monopoly between utility providers in any given region, there is instead room for competition. I claim that even given such competition, those utility providers who offered usage-based billing would be at least as appealing to the public as flat-fee, usage-independent billing.
> Is usage based billing the same as micropayments?
Technically, I suppose you're paying for a resource which you are then allowed to use as you please. But since the average consumer doesn't have access to huge batteries or water reservoirs in their garage, and since utilities companies don't/can't price you differently per watt or gallon or water depending on which appliance you're using, the effect is identical as if utilities companies were instituting rationally (per unit of resource consumed) priced micropayments on each of your household appliances.
For utilities its tolerated because there is a massive difference in cost between servicing different users of different usage patterns. There is no way to have a fixed monthly bill for utilities in a way that is fair. If usage didn't incur such huge costs it would be a fixed bill like internet and phone plans.
While providing extra TV channels costs nothing. Even if you are a power user who watches 10x the TV as a normal person, it doesn't cost the company anything extra.
And also that many of the channels people were insisting they don't want were actually paying for coverage, not charging for it. (Home shopping, religion, etc)
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 thought Spotify's model is all subscriptions go into one pool that gets divided by platform wide listen time.
EDIT: this is indeed the Spotify model while youtuve's approach was to treat premium as a make up for missinflg ad watches so pays out from the individual viewers subscription.
>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...
Blendle [1] had this model for a while but shut it down a couple years ago. It was nice to have to option to buy individual articles from publications that I enjoy reading occasionally but not enough to subscribe.
[1] https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/08/the-poster-child-for-micro...
Washington Post tried cheap "day pass" subscriptions and they didn't really work.
Publishers already relying on subscription revenue need to be careful: some portion of the people already paying $20/mo could save a lot by switching to $1/article.
Newsrooms also hate that approach because of the incentive structure. A lot of the most important stories aren't the ones people want to spend $1 to read.
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/
No bundling model is going to work with the papers worth reading, with high-value ones. Look at that list: no FT, only partial WSJ, no Bloomberg (only Businessweek), no Economist, no NYT, no Foreign Affairs, no SCMP. I guess Foreign Policy and Puck bundled could be cool but most "high-value" publications are excluded. This is like netflix where it's never worth subscribing because it's ten thousand things you don't care to watch.
> No bundling model is going to work with the papers worth reading, with high-value ones.
The "high-value" ones don't need to bother with micro-transactions either. They can tell everyone to kick rocks or pay for their subscription -- because they already have a large well-established market of people that consider them high-value enough to pay their subscription fee.
On the other hand, many of the regional ones (for me) like the Houston Chronicle, The Dallas Morning News, Austin American-Statesman and sometimes the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and Los Angeles Times are not in the same position to do that. That doesn't make them not "high-value". Maybe they could get away with micro-transactions but instead of having to manage that they can sign up with services like Apple News+ and focus on the value they bring, regional news.
It's also subjective as to whether or not the other ones included are "worth reading". I personally enjoy quite a few listed in the Science & Tech section, but don't read them enough to pay for individual subscriptions, or deal with micro-payments that I have forgotten about a month later when the statement arrives.
There may be a space for these "high-value" publications to get together and form their own bundle, if they were so inclined
>Apple News+ is ~$13 The list of publications included
Fyi... Apple News+ subscribers don't get the full subscription to all the participating publications. This means a subset of articles and/or partial articles (teasers) that require extra payment to get past a paywall to read the rest of the story. This surprises some people.
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/why-dont-i-see-full-art...
There is confusion in that thread.
People seem to be complaining that they can’t access Washington Post articles, but in 2024, when that thread was written, The Washington Post was not included in Apple News Plus. It joined in 2025 (https://9to5mac.com/2025/09/29/apple-news-just-added-the-was...).
What you could do before that was register your Washington Post subscription, if you had one, with the Apple News app, then you’d be able to read full Washington Post articles - perhaps this was confusing the forum posters?
I see that happen in the free Apple News, but had not seen it with the Apple News+ subscription.
They may be confusing the 2, similar to how people confuse Apple TV: separately a device, an app, and a subscription service
$13/month is less than many of those sites cost individually, but I get them all for that price?
Yup, this is both the solution and the problem.
Apple News+ has tried this. If anyone could pull it off, it's Apple.
But the problem is, it's not comprehensive enough. The two major newspapers/magazines I read aren't on there, because they've got enough market power to require their own subscriptions. Meanwhile, this is similarly missing the long tail of a lot of links I follow that are paywalled.
And then of course there are the massive usability issues. If I see a link on HN to e.g. Forbes, and click it, I just get the paywall. Apple News+ doesn't work in the browser. I understand that sometimes it's possible to use Share... in the browser to send an article to Apple News+, but that seems to require knowing it's one of the included 300+ publications? Which nobody's going to memorize...
I think there's some digital equivalent of the old "pay 25 cents for a newspaper" model buried in the discussion somewhere.
If I had a quick, anonymous way to pay a site 5 cents to read an article, or a dollar to read all the articles I want for some time period, or something to that effect, I'd happily pay that from time to time. What I don't want is a million subscriptions I have to pay 3 or 4 dollars a month for, when I don't read any individual site often enough for that to make sense.
And I definitely don't want them to model the system after fucking video game transactions. The fact that the author mentions the buying it in game currency as something to base this on blew my mind.
We could make a loot box for news! Maybe you get today's WSJ, maybe you get a National Enquirer.
>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.
In reality every article worth reading is available for free, using certain urls. So I’m not so much refusing to pay for url access as much as I am deciding to pay for publication and app access.
The problem is consistency, or maybe discovery...
If I see a link to an article, or get it as a search result, I have no real way to see the quality of what I'm buying.
With a subscription the assumption is the quality is consistent over time.
> That model is completely counter-intuitive and punitive to the consumer.
It's really not, as evidenced by the fact that paying for what you use is how almost every physical good works, and many professional services (a lawyer's time).
It's fine for you to dislike the model -- I dislike it too. I don't like that it makes me anxious about consuming the next small unit of <whatever>. But there's nothing inherently counterintuitive or punitive about it. It's the simplest and most defensible payment model possible.
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...
> 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.
Why not? The only argument I see here is that you have strong feelings.
People are very accustomed to paying for each thing they buy - that how we acquire almost everything. It may be "punitive" in some sense but it's fundamental to every marketplace.
iTunes thrived on that basis - paying for each song. I don't see people objecting to paying 10 cents (or whatever) to read an article.
Ok a group discount for multiple sites, just allocate money based on which article people click on and you have micropayments.
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 means 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.
I've made a start-up that has really tried making micropayments work (blink.net) and I know there have been many other attempts.
Some of the pain points can always be addressed, as it's just implementation difficulty (having an auto-pay system when opening and article, and actually being able to get a refund within a short time window if the title was clickbait -- with some limitations of course).
The main problems that always remained were:
- the dificutly in convincing a user to actually pay, which was a psichological barrier. People also don't understand that many articles would have to be priced at 20-50 cents, even more, to be worth it, or there should be an issue pass with the actual price of the whole issue.
- the publishing industry being a mess, hard to coordinate as everyone wants to do their own thing, and early experiments failing, ruining the reputation of the idea itself. Many people say micropayments are something that needs a good time, but nobody knows when that time will come.
- the huge fees that processors take (2% + 29 cents), meaning we needed to load into a wallet a minimum of 5$. After learning all the tricks of the industry, I felt a need to throw rotten tomatoes at whoever thinks that cashback should be legal.
The combination always made it a horrible problem, and at this point I'm even considering making the existing project a non-profit, if that might get something off the ground, but now it's just in low-maintenance mode.
This is just off the cuff, but I could go for something sort of like a 'daily paper' deal where I get debited a couple bucks for access to the news papers site for a day, or maybe even just the materials published that day, but that sort of seems more complicated to implement.
Then, if I'm reading it so often that it would be more cost effective to just subscribe they can start pinging me about it.
We have that implemented, it's just that nobody wanted it. Our pitch basically was that "Why can you buy today's paper on the stand, but can't do the same digitally?" Turn out the answer is complicated.
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.
But won't this solution still need:
1. A payment processor for users to turn money into tokens 2. A payment processor for news sites to turn tokens into money 3. A software provider to handle the actual microtransaction part of this (unless they want to learn how to become software developers themselves)?
It seems to me like all the blockchain does here is to make it so this transaction needs 3 software providers instead of just one!
Implementing lightning (bitcoin layer 2 solution) is probably easier or at least at par. And way more accesible. Look at lnurl, lnaddress.
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.
not sure where you data is from but most chains now offer sub millicent fees. https://tokenterminal.com/explorer/metrics/transaction-fee-m...
Transaction fees for bitcoin sent via the lightning network (which is a layer 2 solution) are in the "less than a cent" category and are settled in a few seconds. This is not fiction, this is i.e. how Trump made his for-the-cameras bitcoin payment during his campaign.
Lightning isn't even a good solution for most diehard bitcoin users. It's a failed project.
It would take 27 years to onboard every internet user to the lightning network unless you start adding level 3 aggregators and then at that point you lose all the benefit of it being on chain at all.
It would take almost 2 years just to onboard every American assuming during that time there were zero other bitcoin transactions. Then you need to add the fees for the on and off ramps to the individual transaction fees to get the real cost per transaction noting that these would go up quite a bit as the competition between lightning and non-lightning uses of the transaction space would drive prices higher.
The throughput is arbitrarialy limited by bitcoin's current block size, which hasn't been increased since satoshi's era.
Most cryptocurrencies have an adaptive block-size mechanism which allows the blocks to grow to a reasonable size which could facilitate such an onboarding of users. So it isn't a technical problem, it is just a question of bitcoin's current leadership, which is controlled by companies like blockstream.
People have been debating the blocksize for a very long time now and there doesn't seem to be any large desire to change it so while the ability to increase it exists changing anything that fundamental about bitcoin seems to be a non-starter and while that is true lightning is pointless as a solution for the masses.
Even if you increase the block size 100x though you're still not improving the numbers much since my very generous numbers ignore activity outside of lightning and assume a single on chain transaction for every user and a perfect network.
It is not the blocksize. The throughput of transaction on the lightning network is not at all limited by blocksize or the bitcoin blockchain.
The ability for users to access the lightning network is limited by blocksize since you need transactions to open channels.
> you need transactions to open channels
Maybe your understanding of lightning is wrong here. Yes you open channels, and transactions in lightning need open channels, but you do NOT NEED to open channels for specific transactions. You open channels once, and transact over them for years. I run a lightning node with more than 15 channels (each to different lightning nodes) that are all older than 1 year (I route payments, so I have way more channels than needed). You can batch-open channels, i.e. I could have opened all my 15 channels with a single on-chain transaction. Taproot update would make those "commitment transactions" onchain way smaller (in byte) than needed to in the past.
No misunderstanding at all.
Go read what I've said again. My timelines are based entirely on each user making a single transaction(opening a single channel).
Once channels are open, the users on the lightning network can transact back and forth without any new channel opens/closure and thus no on-chain settlement. Hence: Throughput in lightning is not at all limited on the bitcoin transaction throughput.
Throughput depends on users and users are limited by transaction limits is what I'm saying.
You mistake is, you overestimate the amount of people who want to be self custodial. You don't need to onboard every human being in the world on-chain.
Given the US example that would be several years in the absolute best for lightning case to onboard even 5% of individuals. Lightning is doomed from the start.
And if you don't care about self custody then the overhead of using a blockchain is a waste.
It is not black/white. It is okay to have the freedom to become self-custodial anytime, but not everybody needs to transact in self-custody all the time.
Taproot was another major step that enables lightning upgrades in future versions (such as zero-fee channel opens) that is barely discussed. The number of X years for onboarding Y amount of people is not accurate, as it disregards all major developments of the last 5 years.
You need enough users for providers to bother making it an option to pay with so it really is black and white. You might get a few niche providers offering it as a payment method without a critical mass of users but most companies aren't going to invest time and effort into implementing a payment system a tiny percentage of users have access too and if I need to trade money with my friends the low % means that in the vast majority of cases they aren't going to have lightning available either.
All you are saying is a chicken and egg problem of adoption - nothing todo with the technology itself. Adoption IS growing, so we will see.
It will be on bitcoin, and bitcoin only. Except the payment will done with Lightning. And the lightning network will probably be used to send a stablecoin, utilizing taproot assets. But shurely not some shitcoins that is x402 built on (Ethereum, Solana & Co.) :)
This is all absolutely impenetrable.
Micropayments already exist in the physical world: Venmo, Zelle, etc. It seems easier to just adapt them to the OP's purpose.
"if I keep jamming things into this hole, something will eventually fit, I just know it!"
I pay $19 per month to some company X, and company X distributes this money to all participating websites I visit during that month, in return I get ad-free access to all the content. And this is implemented in a way that no website learns who I am and company X does not learn which websites I visited.
Or you could cut out the middleman and use a micropayment system like GNU Taler to pay the websites directly.
That way you dont have to hope and pray that the middleman doesn't decide to track you censor, and charge increasing fees, which current middlemen like patreon currently do.
GNU Taler also has a middleman, the exchange. And they play more or less exactly the same role as my company X is supposed to do, exchange money for tokens that are handed to websites when you visit them and which they can then redeem. And I would want to avoid true micro transactions, i.e. pay amount x for looking at one article, because then the amount you spent will depend on how many pages you visited in a given month and that might make you think about each click and in turn hinder adoption. I want to pool the money of all users, divide it by the total number of payed links visited in the last month, and then pay that much per click to each participating website.
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.
this is a good counterpoint, but I would say this in response:
1. Ad networks tend to benefit from having more data. There are economies of scale for sites like Youtube vs random pop-up video hosts that would want to mirror youtube videos, for example. The "bottom" may still be a micropayments system because they're easier to deploy.
2. It's possible that the entire ad economy is destroyed anyways through the use of adblockers, which is increasing. Hence google's push for WEI and the general industry push for TC and such. As long as none of these mechanisms of client authentication are able to take over the web, the profitability for ad networks will dry up.
Absent micropayments, there will be other attempts to introduce sybil resistance to the web, due to threats like AI scraping. Currently people are deploying PoW-based solutions, because they are the lowest effort (they can be implemented by polyfill). I imagine a hybrid PoW/micropayments system could emerge where PoW mining shares could be used interchangeably with micropayments. Basically each website acts as a cryptocurrency mining pool, so the website gets some reward in the mean.
I think the main failure of micropayments lies in the integration with the web browser, it needs some sort of plugin where HTTP 402 is effortless to interact with. It goes without saying that if you don't build it, they won't come.
There is not really a "killer app" yet. Some attempts in the bitcoin community like nostr and stacker.news are marginally used (but only to facilitate bitcoin dork-to-dork communication), and there have been some experiments in live-streaming and gaming. But nothing stands out. The barrier to entry of any app that requires putting money in, even a small amount, is naturally very high. A hybrid PoW/micropayment system is promising because it has the lowest barrier to entry.
On the technical side, you have tradeoffs between the complexity of using the app (especially with bitcoin payment channels) and decentralization. I don't regard it as an intractable problem.
The social problem is that most internet users are short-sighted and don't care about decentralization. They are just looking at some new company/service to throw their money into and escape their current service provider, which creates the problem they are running from. See: users fleeing twitter for bluesky, users fleeing streaming services after fleeing cable.
So pretty much any solution with a tradeoff between complexity and decentralization will suffer compared to a totally centralized and simple solution.
The decentralization of the new system needs to enable some new feature to get a foothold. Facilitating piracy is one such example, it could be the "killer app" for micropayments. Sites like Anna's archive already have some sort of cryptocurrency donation mechanism.
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.
Firstly, that appears to be a negative externality. It seems to affect people who use the conventional credit card system as opposed to the new cryptocurrency/micropayments system I propose. So it has the effect of strengthening the cryptocurrency/micropayments system against competition.
For example, I would say that the credit card system is essentially subsidized through other forms of payment via transaction fees/cashback (I can go into detail why I think this is the case, if you would like). This is a mechanism that benefits the credit card companies at the users of other payment mechanisms (cash, crypto, etc.). So this mechanism of the credit card payment system has the effect of strengthening it against competition.
Secondly, I am not even sure if it's a negative externality. It depends on how fraud is handled in the conventional banking system and who takes the blame. Let's say that the charge-back goes all the way to the exchange, so now the exchange that facilitated the transaction is down both X cryptocurrency and Y dollars. In order to be profitable, the exchange needs to charge more in fees and needs to spend more in surveillance to counteract fraud. So ultimately the users of the exchange would pay for fraud.
Lastly, it is important to differentiate the two sources of fraud. There is the fraud inside of the micropayments system, where I pay 0.01 cents to view a webpage and I don't receive what I want. That's a very low-risk fraud, and by gaining a fraction of a cent, they can lose like 100x that in potential business through micropayments.
Then there is the fraud that happens at the border of "hard" money (cash/precious metals/crypto) and "soft" chargeback-able money in the conventional credit card system. This is pretty much facilitated just by these hard forms of money existing and being exchangeable with soft money. I would argue the weakness lies in the insecurity of the soft money systems (specifically the outdated systems of authentication). But you could still apply some sort of limit to the amount of money a single bank account can exchange for crypto (say, $20 a day) without hurting the micropayments system, because the payments involved are so small. So the risk of fraud at the exchange could be much lower for this specific use-case of cryptocurrency.
Even in a fully crypto world there is still boundless fraud potential. Even more than traditional banking.
The most obvious one that comes to mind is someone gets a script to run on your browser that loads a ton of the attackers 1 cent paywall articles. Any legitimate financial tool needs a way to roll back fraudulent transactions.
I imagine that the micropayments system would be facilitated transparently through some popup in the browser, similar to how the browser asks for use of your webcam. I also imagine that some basic, configurable limits would be involved. It would look like "Give news.com ability to request up to 0.10 cents (0.01cents per page load)? Y/N". The first time you load the page.
This is an aside, but in an ideal world, such a mechanism would also be used to reduce fingerprinting! You would have to accept a popup for a page to use features like WebGL, for example.
>Any legitimate financial tool needs a way to roll back fraudulent transactions.
I strongly disagree. I would even say the opposite: the ability to bureaucratically roll-back transactions threatens the legitimacy of money. Specifically, it makes the money non-fungible.
In cryptocurrency, there are transparent multisignature-based escrow systems that allow you to have a defined window of time where the money is co-managed according to certain rules. But transactions need to be able reach a "finalized" state where they are irreversible. Otherwise you just can't ever have a truly secure method of payment between untrustworthy parties and micropayments become useless.
Also, it does not need to be cryptocurrency. Micropayments just need to be efficient, secure, and irreversible. There are other payment systems based on Chaumian cash, (GNU taler being one example) that this could be built on.
But how many people would really go to another site just to save 0.002? I can already go to the internet archive to read paywalled content. If needed and that option will still be available for the people that dont want to pay the 0.002.
Its a social problem and all it takes is one player breaking through. People have done this with far far worse things that people thought were unviable socially. Microbetting, microloans, gaming microtransactions, hardware subscriptions,
Your response is predicated on the fact that sites like archive.org already exist and don't charge. In a world with accessible micropayments, I think pretty much everyone would charge.
Sites like the internet archive are already funded by donations from viewers like you. I see the scheme as essentially spreading out the donations based on who uses the most bandwidth. It makes it easier for anyone to spin up a mirror of archive.org, and it makes it more secure for sites like archive.org to accept donations.
"Intermediate" micropayment solutions already exist. Anna's archive charges like $5 a month for a "donation" that puts you in a fast lane to download PDFs that you would otherwise have to get from some book site or a scientific journal. I bet they would prefer to charge per-download if they could feasibly do it.
I agree that some (most?) applications of micropayments are really gimmicky. But some applications are naturally suited to micropayments. The advantage of micropayments is that you can interact with ad-hoc vendors without setting up a pre-existing financial trust-relationship. For example, you could be at an bus terminal and have several pop-up vendors for wifi or electricity that charge per MB or per watt-hour. It enables competition.
The more gimmicky applications you mention like hardware subscriptions all involve some element of vendor-lock in that prohibits the advantage of micropayments systems in dealing with ad-hoc vendors. This is more analogous to those in-flight wifi services on airplanes: there is an established financial relationship with the airline and no competition, so there's little use for the low-risk micropayments.
I dont think everyone would charge. I think everyone who currently runs ads would charge but there would still be purists who host without ads and without micro transactions. It would still cost to implement the processing on your website and simple sites would not want to do this. It might lower the barrier to donation so sites funded by donation could receive more donations but still keep it optional.
Internet archive is not funded on donations from viewers. Its funded off government grants and corporate donations. individual donations make up a tiny %. Micropayments would make Internet archive less reliant on charity from government and corporations and it would not impact peoples ability to spin up a mirror. people can already spin up a mirror but its expensive and would remain expensive.
Anna's archive is whale pricing, a tiny % of people are willing to pay that $5 and the hope is that they subsize costs for the rest of users. I hate this type of monetization and will always oppose it as its highly risky and unfair.
> For those who disagree, ask yourselves; would you pay me 2 cents before you click that link.
A straw man. That's not the only way to do it. Asking this instead is helpful: "what might make this work?" and explore that in depth and try some experiments.* It might be a collective action problem or a first-mover problem or a culture problem. Such classes of problems are hard, sometimes even insanely hard for anyone lacking massive influence, but not categorically unworkable or impossible.
> I get the sentiment but micropayments just don’t work
I don't buy this generalization. Maybe micropayments don't "work" yet according to some (unstated, unfortunately) ideas of scope or degree. But smallish payments have worked (to some degree, for some periods of time) for music downloads and political contributions, just to mention a few things. There is something to smaller-than-usual payments, this seems pretty clear. (Yes, there is a sort of lower quantum based on the slice a payment processor takes, so creative bundling is often needed.)
Maybe micropayments according to some particular definition are unlikely to work for online content under current constraints. Still, the world is a big place, and the future (hopefully) leaves a lot of room for experimentation.
Aside: maybe a bigger problem is the status-quo idea of "news". Most of the "news" I real feels almost like junk food.
* I prefer to ask "what would make something work?" or "what is blocking something from working?" rather than claiming "X can (or can't) work". This is not because I'm naive or an optimist. I'm neither. But I'm genuinely curious about how and why things work, and the way one frames the question has a big effect on where your brain leads you.
P.S. WRT exaggeration or overconfidence: just say no. Let's make nuance the norm. It can start here, one comment at a time.
P.P.S. I'll say this again, and it _should_ make people uncomfortable: I'm getting more value out of interacting with a high quality LLM with a solid prompt than a typical comment on HN, and this does not bode well. I still hope that people can step it up, but we're not there yet, for various reasons.
Micropayments is something that I think the internet as a whole needs. However, I don't think the mental model people usually have isn't quite "micro" and frictionless enough.
Imagine a world where your web browser essentially contains and controls your wallet. You pre-pay into that wallet, say, $20. I imagine we'll probably also refer to that as "credits" so internationalization isn't so tough. So let's pretend we have 2000 credits. Now, let's start browsing the internet.
You start by conducting a web search. Perhaps there is a mechanism in HTML and the browser that basically say, "Clicking this will cost 1c". We'd probably develop a shorthand, some icon and beside it, it says the price in credits. Imagine a button like [(1c) Search].
Immediately, what is the benefit? The search engine works for you. It's like Kagi in that regard, but you didn't need to set up an account and give them your credit card information. YOU are the customer. There are no ads, they need to compete to make the search results the best, otherwise you're going somewhere else. You're no longer the product.
You see a news article in your search result. Fantastic. You visit the news website - there isn't an ad in sight. Pure news. The article starts with a title, a few lines, perhaps the first paragraph, and to read more, you click that [2c Read the Article] button. You click it, and boom, you see the entire article. No subscriptions, no popups, no ads. You are the customer. The news site wants you to be happy, not advertisers. You.
The news article discusses a new open source project that is really taking off. Cool! You click the link. Looks pretty neat! You download it, toy with it, and find that it's actually pretty useful! You go back to their repo site, and there's a little tip option. Easy peasy. You tip them 100 credits. No signing up for an account at some other site, no entering your credit card, just done and done.
I like the idea of micropayments because it makes the user the customer again. The internet has become incredibly hostile to users since we are, by and large, the product rather than the customer. We need to flip the incentive model. Does it suck to pay for things on the internet? A little. But I'd rather that and get a great experience (and also allow news organizations to have a working business model, etc) than what we have now.
Taxes and AML/KYC kill this. People need to surveil their customers in order to comply with legal requirements. As soon as money is involved there's so much bureaucracy people just contract it out to intermediaries like Stripe and by then payments are anything but micro.
The real innovation of cryptocurrency is that it allows people to think outside the box of AML/KYC.
Stablecoins, which not decentralized at all (and thus defeat the entire purpose of cryptopcurrency) are allowed to break the rules by wearing the label of "cryptocurrency", with the implication being that cryptocurrencies are just going to break the rules anyways.
Isn't the Brave web browser based on this idea, using cryptocurrency?
Yeah, BAT was supposed to be exactly this, you'd mine it by browsing and tolerating non targeted ads from your browser and you'd pay it to content creators in lieu of tolerating their targeted ads.
It was a great idea, but I get the feeling that it stalled somewhere along the way.
If I'm publishing something, I want maximum revenue.
If I can guarantee repeat customers then I can make the reader the sole focus, but if I still have to maximise based on capricious trends and search indexing, then I'll probably maximse the payment, the adds, and sell your data as well.
Subscription services are probably the only way, unless we see a consolidation of hosts with a consistent brand and quality, enough to trust a micro transaction will get something of the quality I expect.
I imagine micropayments for small sites to avoid DoS (e.g. from dumb AI scrapers) and maybe get decent profit if they become very popular, but mainly pay to keep the server running. They would be so small that someone who spends their entire day visiting different websites would pay less than their phone bill; and centralized scrapers with a decent amount of funding would still work.
Real funding would come in ways that don't depend on visitor count: patronage, government/industry grants, people running the sites having side jobs, UBI. Because:
- I'd rather avoid intellectual property and allow AI summaries, remixes, etc. without penalty to the main site
- Visitor count tends to benefit mainstream sites. Patronage and grants can support niche sites who expect few users that are willing to pay more, without gating mainstream visitors (via higher visitor micropayments) in case they become popular
- Visitor count benefits sites that have already been built. Patronage and grants support sites that look promising, but haven't been built and may fail. The latter include indie and experimental sites; the former only include sites that are easy to build, and sites whose success is predictable from people that already have money
- I'm skeptical that revenue from visitor count (even from ads or subscriptions) will remain sustainable long-term
The above doesn't only apply to traditional sites, but any digital product including ones people currently pay for, like books, movies, and video games. These creators need to make a living, but since their product is not physical, there is no need to tie revenue to copies sold, and I suspect tying revenue to patronage and grants would lead to better products.
> 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.
I'm reminded of how tedious it is when people debate how small something has to be before it can be called a microservice... Maybe the language needs to focus on something besides size.
If you pre-pay, you're creating a debt which is destroyed when service is rendered. If you post-pay you're creating a debt when service is rendered that is destroyed when you pay. In both cases the logic of when and how you pay is decoupled from the thing you're paying for. You've got to ask how far you'll let the two accountings drift (sync monthly is a common choice).
My feeling for "micropayments" is that they happen as part of the same protocol which is providing service. There's just one accounting. Settlement schedule is determined by the nature of the service. Maybe it's page views or packets or gulps, but whatever it is it's imposed by circumstance. They're... situated payments?
And the other style is... decoupled payments?
The difference is that in micropayments the debt is practicially nothing, a fraction of a cent. So there's basicially no risk. Pre-pay, post-pay, doesn't really matter.
With minipayments, you could still lose a dollar or something. It's like a vending machine. If I put in a dollar and don't get a cookie, I will be pissed. You can run a buisness of setting up fraudulent vending machines that scam customers on the first purchase and dont put out cookies.
I don't really care if I put a tenth of a cent in and don't get my crumb out. I just won't buy the rest of the cookie. The margin on selling me the whole cookie is greater than scamming me out of a fraction of a cent. So it's not feasible to scam.
So the distinction matters. It's a difference in kind because in one model there is enough risk to sustain a buisness model off of scamming, which requires all this extra infrastructure for fraud prevention.
The benefit of micropayments is you don't need all this overhead for for fraud. Anyone can set up a vending machine pretty much anywhere and sell to anyone else.
The $1 in-game content payments are already so well known (and for such a long time) as "micropayments" I had thought that was where the term originated.
Isn’t it microtransactions? Which kind of hints at the difference, since it’s all the ceremony of a two party transaction, while micropayments proposals usually have some focus on being automatic or frictionless
As a disgruntled journo who’s doing mostly very different things to live, I believe the fundamental issue is that we keep treating journalism as a business. It is not sustainable as such anymore for a long time, and keeping it structured as a business creates all sorts of wrong incentives. Good journalism today comes mostly from no profits, and that is the only model that makes sense in my view. Make it so that foundations and governments can legally fund newspapers from a non political organ and have a charity-style funding process. That’s true for newspapers but not really for tv, so this is not a panacea. In general I find it fascinating how we try to analyze all sorts of business cases for newspapers except this one (aka they’re not a business anymore).
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...
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.
> Clay Shirky or Andrew Odlyzko's arguments around the mental cost of microtransactions remain valid
What about iTunes, and money transfer apps like Venmo and Zelle, which people use widely for microtransactions (and more)?
Microtransactions are like paying $0.10 for an article.
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.
what's the patent?
https://blog.majid.info/pdf/patent_ppv.pdf
(in French, however)
It's a micropayment proxy using network authentication, billing on your ISP bill, with a reload grace period to prevent double-billing. It was deployed by France Telecom in its Wanadoo retail Internet service, but most of the money they made was from selling ringtones, not the original purpose of migrating Minitel service providers to the Web.
Micropayments would be devastating for news because they'd reveal what people actually value at the margin. Subscriptions work precisely because they obscure this — you pay $15/mo and read 3 articles, and the newspaper pretends that's fine.
Per-article pricing would expose that 90% of online journalism is commodity rewrites of AP wire stories. The 10% that's genuinely original would thrive, and everything else would die overnight. Which is exactly why no major outlet will ever voluntarily adopt this.
- The 10% that's genuinely original would thrive, and everything else would die overnight.
And you are saying that's a bad thing?
Good point
> Per-article pricing would expose that 90% of online journalism is commodity rewrites of AP wire stories.
And recommendations for products they've never tried, with affiliate links.
>> And—like any other payments directly from readers—micropayments would be a multiplier for advertising, not an alternative.
WTF, no way
>> no drug like attention ... help develop the habit....
Mark Z. again ??
legit advertisers ?¿?
Are there any ?? taboola and their ilk unremovable apps ? anybody wants their heads blow up?
>>The survival of legit sites depends on how quickly marketers can level up to stuff
Bonkers. Legit sites depend on reaching financial independence on legit valuable content that people want to read.
It is true that I look to this from an EU perspective. I am biased
Time ago a colleague and I pitched YC for compsate.com, basically a wallet (real money, forget crypto) based system ( no subscriptions ) for news/content micropayments system. The idea was based on no adds, no tracking, read news like you buy a newspaper at the kiosk. Pay 2 orders of magnitude more for each article you read (than what ads provide per page), your choice. Replenish wallet at will.
Logging into a system (acquiring an ID token in the process), then browse freely to any news site and read any content, including pay-walled which would be paid out of your wallet. All near real time. Small amounts would drive down risk of fraud, that could be as well controlled by the selection of news stand that can join.
Pay for what you read, compensate for the value of what you read, make your news source independent (at least financially).
We fail the pitch but I believe it still is doable and preferable for the media if they would set up such a platform together. You know the commons....sometimes wins.
> We know that micropayments can work because mobile games are a thing
Do we?
If anything, we know micropayments won't result in quality journalism because mobile games are a thing.
> but mobile game developers have figured out how to get people to spend money on in-app-purchases (IAP), by turning it into a two-step process.
Nah. I mean yes this is one of the psychological tricks that makes players pay on mobile, but it's not that big a deal. The real deal of mobile games:
- Difficult curve design: you know how slot machines show you two matching symbols and one off, instead of three random ones? It has to make the player feel like they can reasonably beat the level, but just "a little bit unlucky..."
- PvP element: Basically pay to win, but presented more like 'grind to win.' Free players can theoratically beat who paid if they grind for needed resources for thousands of hours. So they can tell themselves that they're just 'saving time' when they eventually pay.
- Soft porn: A lot of mobile games from Chinese/Japanes/Korean publishers are just soft porn by western standards.
Are these what we want to replicate on news sites? I think this article sugarcoats the dark patterns in mobile games to convince the author themselves that micropayment won't lead to a race to the bottom.
IMO the thread is asking the wrong question ("can micropayments work?") They can, but we need to start with first principals on what's technically necessary to move value, and what can we toss out (from both traditional/card systems and crypto). You need a linearly scalable state machine and a means of orchestrating the changes in that state between actors. Everything else (kyc, fraud protections, etc.) is secondary. Machines are likely going to be paying extreme small amounts between each other, so its highly questionable whether that state machine (a) needs to protect for fraud at .001 cents per tx and (b) whether a machine, acting on its own accord, spending .001 was contemplated during the construction of the bank secrecy act (which had the de minimis oversight of transactions at ~82k USD in 2026 values). Ensure no double spend, ensure that the machines can move value as needed, change the state. Ensure that the system scales as much as the volumes of transactions needed. And charge effectively free rates (we're at 10m tx/usd). Lots more to build here, but we're not far off. (and we're launching soon at radiustech.xyz). Come check us out.
have you heard the good news about our lord and savior chaumian cash?
eCash is an answer to "can you move value privately?" (yes, with concessions). Radius is solving "can you execute a million conditional state transitions per second at sub-penny costs?" Blind signatures are still just value transfers and offer no expressivity. If your agent wants DvP with conditional logic, or trustless escrow that releases on programmatic conditions, Chaumian eCash doesn't help. LN gets you close to some forms of atomic exchange, but close-to-atomic isn't atomic, and neither gives you composability. You can move balances, but you can't orchestrate multi-step workflows that can't unwind in the middle.
I imagine you could have some contract that interacts with ecash, based on revelation of a blind signature. Similar to a HTLC.
I have actually written up some ideas for a system based on something like this that I called "chaumian coupons", but I would have to go through my notes to find it.
Indeed, for any particular outcome you could design a custom protocol. In contrast, Radius gives you a generic execution environment. Going custom you lose EVM tooling, audited standard contracts, and every bespoke protocol needs its own security analysis, its own edge case handling, and its own integration work.
That said, the most important loss is composability: an agent can't take your Chaumian coupon escrow and snap it together with someone else's DvP protocol and a third party's rate-limiting wallet in a single atomic transaction. The power of a shared execution environment is that these interaction patterns don't need to be anticipated and designed around in advance. Agents aren't going to negotiate which custom protocol to use for every interaction (the necessary protocol might not even exist!), they will use shared infrastructure where composability of various primitives is the effortless default.
I think that in the large, efficiency does matter. You are optimizing a three-variable problem of efficiency, decentralization, and configuration of the smart contracts.
The fact that AI agents are involved does not nessisarially tilt the scale towards the configurability of smart contracts. If you have extra cognition, you can probably spend some time thinking about what specialized protocol to use.
I am pessimistic on etherium and similar "open-ended" scripting cryptocurrencies because everything they can do can be replicated with a specialized cryptocurrency. So as soon as some killer app emerges (e.g. ENS) people will realize that it's more cheap/fast/decentralized to do this with a specialized system (e.g. namecoin).
The open-ended systems like etherium can only succeed if there is demand for constantly-novel open-ended scripting that interacts with other open-ended scripts all the time. I really don't think that's the case. If you can capture 90% of the use case with different specialized cryptocurrencies and do atomic swaps between them, that will always be better from a technological standpoint.
The fundamental limit of cryptocurrencies is bandwidth, and how much data you can sync between all nodes: either you have a few high-bandwidth nodes or many low-bandwidth nodes. Splitting different contracts across networks is naturally better than sharing a single blockchain and competing for gas.
People don't want this to be the case because you can't achieve vendor/cryptocurrency lock in, and "competition is for losers". If you have multiple independent blockchains, you pretty much must have multiple tokens. But it's true.
The moat for "utility" smart-contract systems is dependent on the cost of switching, which will be lowered by AI if anything. At the end of the day you can just fork the blockchain if you don't like the tokenomics or even just the fees. Some assembly required, but that is why stuff like litecoin can exist in this market.
Sounds centralized.
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.
Put out good content that people want to read and people will read it and pay you for it. Youtubers do fine with inconsistent revenue for each video. There is usually less risk writing an article than producing a video.
They do a version of the SEO/ads game. They also are mostly just people talking. Journalism requires orders of magnitude more effort and resources.
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.
The YouTube Premium model seems to be the way forward here. In short, pay $5 per month and every video you watch gets paid slightly more per view than they would if you watched ads. Expanding this to a larger ecosystem may require a larger fee, but avoiding the friction of people deciding whether the marginal cost to read an article is worth it is an obvious win.
i believe in the world of long-form text content, this is the medium.com model. the've been working at this for a while, i think even before youtube premium existed.
they're still kicking, but it hasn't exactly been a roaring success.
Relevant data point: built httpay.xyz which applies this model beyond news to any API. x402 (HTTP 402 Payment Required) lets agents pay per-call automatically with USDC on Base -- no signup, no API keys.
Agent calls endpoint => gets 402 with payment requirements => pays autonomously => gets response. 121 endpoints so far ($0.001-$0.005 each).
First real paying users came in this week. The agents paid, got the data, moved on. Exactly as intended.
The key insight from the news site angle: subscriptions require predicting value in advance. Per-call payments flip that -- you only pay for what you actually use. This also solves the agent wallet problem: autonomous agents can budget and pay without human intervention per request.
I used to work on for a company on a product that did exactly this, but the company stopped working on that product since it didn't go anywhere (API docs seem to still be online though :D https://docs.satoshipay.io/api/). Some small publishers liked it, big ones wanted to force their customers to subscribe (whilst recording their data at the same time).
I really like the general idea though and hope it does make a comeback. I think it would be good for review/test sites especially.
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.
I assume it was more about dollars and cents than pretensions. Scroll was plausible as a replacement for ad network revenue, but at $5/month it can't come close to robust subscription or premium ad revenue. NYT subscription is more than the entire $5.
I believe the main reason that Flattr failed was just bad execution. After a successful start and Flattr being used more and more, they just stopped iterating on it, leaving it dormant for years. Partnering with Adblock Plus was the final nail in the coffin.
Scroll was successful. I had a subscription, and it worked on multiple sites that I was visiting.
So Twitter acquired and killed it.
People already pay for journalism through substack. It's not micropayments, it's a commitment to the ongoing consumption of a high quality creator's work.
I can't think of a single news outlet that isn't obviously propaganda or virtue porn. People who want that can have it, but the internet has has made the business models common knowledge, and now most people would be embarrassed to consume these outlets.
All of that was true before prediction markets, now if a fact is important enough, it has a market, and if I need to know the best take on that fact, I will look at the market.
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.
If one thinks about this problem deeply, and the current solution of showing ads, you may realize that micro transactions are already “implemented”. Ads are paid for by the advertiser as mille-impressions (or conversion, etc), which works way better than demanding money at that level - and they get it no matter what. This implicit payment works way better than making consumers think about it and start the debate of value and trust and so on that everyone are debating here.
Micropayments gives me flexibility that subscription doesn't. I'm happy to pay $5 a month just to read Matt Levin. I'm not paying $40 for Bloomberg subscription. It also gives publishers signal on what really users care about and more importantly what are they willing to pay for. Maybe, there is a truly crypto market here for micropayments without the overhead of operators like Stripe
I have long been a big proponent of micropayments. I wish more news sites tested it out. Heck any kind of site, don’t bother me with a notification that I am using an adblocker, just ask in same pop up for me to pay $0.1 to view the page or whatever the market rate is.
Absolutely nothing has changed since the 90s. News should be free. Free with unobtrusive ads if you want pictures and video to help with hosting costs. Stop trying to fiddle with this formula. lite.cnn.com is all we will ever need in terms of getting the message. Mircopayments are not a solution because nothing needs to be fixed.
One unobtrusive ad in the middle of an article isn't going to pay for a journalist and their camera person in a war zone.
By "news should be free" I think you probably mean "taxpayer funded".
Good journalists don't aspire to become wealthy. I meant what I wrote. The cost to fetch the article off a server and display it on my screen is too cheap to measure. A few ads will cover it.
Pro Tipp: Use Revolut or Privacy.com and create a new virtual number, then buy with this the "1 month for free for 1 USD" testsubscription here and there - then you just cancel/destroy the virtual number immediately
If you're going to do that, just using archive.is is easier on everyone around.
In my country there are some newspaper/magazines/etc. which are prohibiting Archive.IS/PH very very good because of their detection - at some this is working.
Don't forget to donate your $1 access token to the archive; you might be the first and only compatriot to do so.
Cool idea! Didnt know this is possible!
I would leave something about the article but I can't get over the horrendous layout of this website. Why is the article using only 20-30% of the horizontal space?
Why is the left pane similar posts wrapping after 2 or 3 words?
Shocking. I'd pay $1.00 to load this article and have it look decent.
What we need is a netflix/spotify model, but for the news.
I never pay for the news, because it's mostly disappointing.
But I would pay 20 euros a month if I could have access to all the news, and just let me filter little by little what I think suits me.
- stupid question: why dont news websites do affiliate partnerships with every software as a service guy out there?
- Surely they can get 30% for each sale right?
- Millions of people visit them and vast majority are not interested in buying a subscription just to read one post
Often times on fal.ai I'm trying a new text to image model and I just get an error. I try again, fail, try again and it works. Sad seeing it take $0.05 and give me an error but most of the time I pull the one-armed bandit again.
The Nostr model spread, actually, while most still ignore even it's existence...
> We know that micropayments can work because mobile games are a thing.
We know that micropayments can work because slot machines are a thing, but I don't think most people would say that's what entertainment should be.
Similarly, journalism can do better. Are people going to pay $0.20 to read "One thing financial advisors won't tell you, you'll retire 10 years earlier!", or are you going to pay $0.20 for "‘It feels like a worse version of Lotto’: what Australians told us about the great intergenerational wealth transfer" (a Guardian special report from today).
I know I'd rather pay to read the latter, but between clickbait and optimising revenue, the former is going to perform a lot better. Not to mention that the cost to produce slop content will be near zero, so they can charge less, where the cost to produce high quality content will be far higher and will therefore not be able to compete on price.
I'd much rather commit to paying $10 a month for news and then choose which articles get a share of that after reading. If I've already committed it costs me nothing to pay for an article, but by doing it after reading I can much more easily support good journalism. The problem with that is that it will probably trend towards just the news subs we have today.
This has to be done on gov level to neuter this fn you have to show ads to stay afloat bullsheeet.
The payment in mobile games are a one button click. Browsers will never support this, as they're all funned by advertising.
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.
This is a problem that I've been thinking on for years now.
It used to be common to just buy a newspaper without handing out any kind of personal information. Walk up to a newsagent/kiosk, hand over a small amount of money, and voila, you have your news.
Then came subscriptions. Great for publishers and advertisers: they have predictibility in how many papers to print, know exactly when and where to deliver them, and advertisers know exactly how many people their printed ads will reach. But it came at the cost of having to provide the paper (or their distributor, maybe your local paper boy) with your address and payment details.
Then came news sites. Initially entirely free because the web was new and no one knew what they were doing. Then with ads. Then with more and more intrusive ads, which started harvesting and stealing personal information against our wishes, which started being used to create highly specific profiles of people. To all the better serve more ads.
Then came paywalls. Where in order to read an article, you now have to go through to the ads/profiling spiel, AND on top of that you have to hand out your name/address/email/payment details just to read a single god damned article.
I would love for us to have a way to go back to the original situation. I give you money, and only money, you give me news. No name. No address. No ad profiling. Zilch.
But because of a fear of terrorists, anonymous payments on the interwebs are effectively impossible.
It's a sad state of affairs, really.
The reality is that articles are worth something like .000000001 cents per read, not 1 or 2 cents. See music streaming.
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.
Much very successful tech is the progeny of failed old ideas - maybe most of it. Look at AI, as a glaring example. Look at video calls. ...
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.
There's a good reason why almost all the media is owned by a few conglomerates
If bots could be forced to pay per crawl somehow, it would subsidize nearly all legit user traffic.
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”?
Not at all. The whole point is that I want discretion over which articles get rewarded for providing me value, not simply monetizing my attention.
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.
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'm looking at the next generation. Reading the news is unheard of for 30 and under. They prefer to listen to it or watch it.
Ahh, right, definite blind spot for me! (extra so since I'm hearing impaired)
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.
I agree Scroll seemed very promising but I'm not sure how successful they were. Did they provide more income than ads from subscription fees? Meeting that goal while burning investors money is less impressive.
Scroll also used a browser extension by the way.
They had basically no investor money.
> Did they provide more income than ads from subscription fees?
Yes. That's literally all they did. You paid for a subscription, and they distributed subscription fees among the sites that you visited.
In return, you got an ad-free browsing experience.
By the time they got killed, it was used on Ars Technica, TheDailyBeast, TheVerge and some other major news sites.
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.
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.
The artists are there because of their own free will. They voluntarily signed their contracts with the record labels. How are journalists and independent journalism doing in comparison?
+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.
We also have PBS as a model.
The problem we have is that there are a ton of sites all asking for $5+. With PBS people can choose to give once at whatever they're comfortable with and aren't dealing with an ever increasing number of $5 charges. Some guy's Medium blog probably isn't worth $5 just like I wouldn't pay $5 for any random show on PBS. But donating to PBS once makes me feel like I'm supporting Frontline, Ken Burns, lots of people I like.
Until it gets defunded based on the whims of the administration :(
That doesn't change the fact that it worked for fifty five years.
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?
Right. The problem is all the cooperation required. So then what's needed is an open platform that lets people put in their $10, and then sites can choose to implement it. It's a chicken and the egg problem. It hasn't worked in the past, but times change. Instead of looking at this like 3D televisions or VR, the counter example to think about is tablets — (note: human typed emdash) the Apple Newton was a flop, but the iPad is anything but. Or electric cars. The EV1 by GM was a flop and whatever you think about Elon Musk and Tesla, they do exist now. Video calling is another one. The 90's version just didn't work, but I use Facetime almost every day.
The rails exist for micropayments with cryptocurrency, it's "just" going to take the right person and the right software to implement it for it to happen. The problem is money. LEDs that come in blue are foundational to our modern society. Without blue, we'd only have red and green. Unfortunately for him, the inventor of the blue LED, the man who poured his everything into making it, isn't ridiculously wealthy. For micropayments to happen, some one selfless and not seeking to make a profit on it, need to come along and make it a thing. So I don't know if it'll happen, because ghostty's funding model can't be replicated, but a man can dream.
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 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.
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.
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.
> ... 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.
> Fact-checkers and whatever you call people that gauge political biases aren't impartial sources of information. Someone pays their bills and those people typically have agendas besides delivering objective truth.
That's meaningless: It's like saying everyone is a liar or everyone is violent, or a potential murderer or everyone's partner is an adulterer. Yes, anyone can, everyone lies, nobody is perfect - but some people are 'honest' and some are 'liars' and there is all the difference in the world.
It's not though? People aren't doing fact-checking out of kindness, they're doing it because they're being paid to do it. The people paying them expect a certain outcome from their fact-checking activities, and objectivity doesn't really factor into the picture, but ensuring a certain narrative prevails, does.
Pretending that a news story is factually correct because someone is getting paid to check it for accuracy is asinine. The fact checkers themselves have biases and aren't objective sources of truth, same with the people supplying their paychecks.
The fact that people have the capacity to lie and be violent, but that not everyone is a liar or a murderer is obvious and doesn't need to be stated.
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.
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 hard part is the noise:
Very few sites offer quality, original, important content.
Nobody wants to pay for a site the repeats the same old stuff that every other site does, especially when those other sites don't have a paywall. This drives the cost of content to zero, which leads companies to rely on ads, and ad blockers to block those ads.
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
this utopian ‘legit’ news site does not actually exist anywhere
they are all propaganda factories with different grades of editorial gloss
ft.com and crazyshit.com are equally unserious, but only one is transparent about it
I used to find this and the whole idea of "Web3" ridiculous, but with the recent saturation of low-quality slop and disinformation, perhaps it's time to reconsider.
I enjoy reading thorough publications written by actual humans who have something to say. Part of why I'm here. And I'd take micropayments over subscriptions anytime.
There's just one catch nobody seems to be eager to talk about. While I'm willing to pay that 1¢, if it's 1¢ + any identifying information, I'm out.
seriously, this bullshit and ISP raising prices of what's basically UBER cheap: transporting data to others via internet
information should be free and not locked under paywalls; in no time if this pill is swallowed you will have the same level of shallow articles but this time, all paid
> 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?
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The statement you quoted was about Big Tech oligarchs, not media bias. You need to work on your reading comprehension.
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