No you don't. You think you want micropayment, but you don't.

The problem with the "pay for quality article regardless of where they come from" theory is that you don't know what "quality" is until you have already consumed it. But then again, if you've already consumed it, then you're too late to decide if it's worth reading or not.

This is why reputation is important in journalism. If you step back and think about it, your sense of "quality" depends 99% on what other people think. I'm not insulting you, this is how it works. People have better things to do than sitting around reading every single article to figure out if it's high quality or not, and that's why most people regardless of intelligence rely on reputation to judge quality.

That's why the successful model will be building a news organization with high reputation. That's what people actually want (so they don't have to waste time trying to decide what to trust or not) and that's what makes sense for the organizations financially. That's why the micropayment model will never replace the subscription model and increasingly so.

That was the hope going back well over a decade. But it never really played out. Clay Shirky's main argument against it was transaction costs. Not payment processing costs (although that was an issue at the time) but simple mental transaction costs. There's a big difference between free and even a penny or two. People get mired down in having to decide if they want to buy something or not.

In this future, how do you determine quality articles before reading them?

I'm curious about what a micro payments world would be like, but I'm skeptical about their prospects in the near-future.

In general, I don't think people like being nickel & dimed, and that's basically what micro payments are. Subscriptions allow one to rationalize the price upfront, then consume without concern. This appeals to heavy consumers, consumers who overestimate their usage, as well as consumers who don't want to think about each purchase.

There would need to be a large enough category of people who would be willing to buy a few articles per month, but not want a subscription. And that would need to generate a large enough profit beyond paying for the micro payments implementation, support, etc.

Micro payments are an interesting idea, but they just have too many issues at the moment.

Like say, being awkward to set up with normal payment processors. Things like taxes and fees mean that genuinely 'cheap' articles (read, a couple of dollars or less) are prohibitively awkward or expensive to set up.

They also don't have popular appeal as a concept, since free competition is just too high. Yeah, some people will pay for 'quality'. But a lot of people will just find free alternatives regardless of how accurate or well written the content is. Or if they're like a lot of people now, they'll write off the sources charging for content as 'fake news' and 'propaganda'.

And it also doesn't really fix the clickbait issue. It makes it slightly less convenient for some people (since you can't trick the 1% of people that see through your shoddy reporting any more), but most people just want content based on their own biases. Even when the content is something they're paying for.

I mean, look at a print newspaper if you need proof of that. Over here in the UK, questionable quality tabloids and gossip rags like the Sun and the Daily Mail sell a whole lot better than the likes of the Telegraph or Guardian. If micro payments caught on as a concept, I suspect the same thing would happen there. People would buy poor quality articles that support their own views and don't challenge any of their beliefs.

Just for your interest, I worked for a company that believed micro-payments was the way to pay for content on the internet in the late 1990s. It was called Qpass. The idea was that you could buy some credits, and use your Qpass at any of the sites in the network to pay for specific articles. Qpass wasn't able to make that model work at the time.

Qpass ended up pivoting to helping wireless carriers with flexible billing solutions for digital content.

[1] http://www.seattlepi.com/business/article/Qpass-sold-for-275...

I recall Readability doing something like that a few years ago. You paid a fee to them, then when you bookmarked a page, some would go to the producer. There were many flaws, not the least of which was that they were effectively forcing an opt-in on the part of content creators, but now that "readability" views that strip ads and extraneous content are built into browsers, it seems like the system had some merit.

I don't think that works. As someone said, how do you know before hand if it is high quality? You're going to read reviews of an article before you buy it and read it. Furthermore, news organizations need some sort stable business in order to, you know, run a a high quality news organization.