We've been needing a micro payment standard since 2000, and one has yet to materialize.
Apple, Google, Steam, Sony (PS4 store) and others all have micro-transactions solved for their purposes (with credit cards, prepaid options and user "wallets"). So this isn't likely to really be an obstacle for Blendle.
Why does that prevent it? Just exchange it immediately via an automated service (look at BitPay for an example), they take the minute to minute risk for 1% profit and you don't have to worry about it.
Given that Bitcoin is as stable as say the USD, someone is going to win or lose money on the conversion between "real" currencies and Bitcoin. I won't be risking money becoming worth less, and neither are the publisher.
I don't know BitPay, but I don't assume that they the risk of devaluation of my Bitcoin for weeks or months. We're not talking about buying just the amount of Bitcoins I need for one article, say 20 cent, because fees attached to the credit card transaction your will want to buy at least a little more.
Agreeable there is a point to be made in the fact that the price of each article is so low that you would only need to buy something like $5 worth of Bitcoin, and at that point it doesn't really matter if you lose %20.
Still I don't feel like Bitcoin is the right option, but maybe it could be the backend to a micro payment system. I just don't want to deal with the Bitcoins or conversion to my local currency.
Given that Bitcoin is as stable as say the USD
If not, it's pretty hopeless for this application.
[edit] it's only the user experienced latency that needs to be that low, of course. And you might be able to get away with 10s. But not 100.
Perhaps not using purely bitcoin, but using it as a medium of exchange still makes sense with a volatile currency. As long as bitcoin is converted to/from a fiat currency within a short time period the risk of value fluctuations is pretty low.
This is the approach that coinetize (https://www.coinetize.com/) seems to be taking. They take bitcoin (among other payment methods), and convert it into credits which are valued at fractions of a dollar, and pay out bitcoin to the journalist when these credits are spent to access a page.
The transactional cost for bitcoin is too large to make 1:1 btc micro payments work right now.
You could even pretend the tokens where bitcoins, but individual 25c transactions are not going to show up on the block chain.
PS: Dogecoin can handle ~10x as many transactions as bitcoin so it might work better for this. But, even then you can't have millions of people doing several transactions per day.