A Thought for Your Pennies: Micropayment and the Liberation of Content (2009)

What does he have to say about cryptocurrencies, and the impending possibility that they might make micropayments a reality?

so good, just recently found it too.

As a theoretical solution to what you are saying, you could implement this in aggregate -- the ISP accepts a flat "content" payment from all its subscribers, sums the time spent on each site from each user, and then pays out micropayments to each content provider as a percentage of the total content payments received from all subscribers. Sort of analogous to how the Tor network prevents deanonymization. You could even implement it as an open-source browser extension in the same fashion as Tor.

Ultimately however, this solution has two major flaws that I can think of up front -- first, it is too susceptible to botting, and second, it relies on a steadfastly privacy conscious central party (the ISP in this example) that never accidentally hires an Eric Schmidt-type who gives in to the monetary value of data. Having just read Tim Wu's "The Attention Merchants" I don't have a lot of hope for that.

The answer is to take the ISP out of this picture. How did they get in there anyway? You pay the content producer directly.

The whole history of the web seems to illustrate to me the impossibility of micropayments - they are fairly inextricably wrapped up with DRM, essentially.

But further, there's a very doable "pay stuff as an alternative to ads" approach people talk about occasionally - a multi-newspaper, multi-content-provider "all-your-can-eat" subscription. Charge a rate for each subscriber and divide it among each publication with some multipliers for quality and traffic generation - You'd have a way for publications to get compensated by readers without need for ads.

This kind of tech is certainly doable and readers could certainly be found.

But problem comes from not reader or tech but the newspaper and content providers generally.

A lot of people bemoaning free web content ignore the way that pre-web, long before the web, magazines and newspapers were primarily ad supported. And TV was, of course, entirely ad supported from the start. That was and is the only way to pay for the slick, print fashion magazines you still see and certainly the way to pay for video in it's infancy.

Ad agency essentially can and will pay much more to direct your eyeballs than you will pay for your eyeball's and this situation started long before the web (for most values of 'you', please don't fill reply-space with testamonials other, I know about the other 'you'). The problem of the web for newspapers has been that a previously captive audience roamed free and the papers could no longer serve as its gate keepers - a big problem and one that arguably resulted in a serious loss to journalism. But the "oh nose, we lost our subscribers" complaint doesn't tell the whole story - they wanted their subscribers 'cause they were their subscribers unique influencers, not for the money.

Which brings us back to micropayments, which one assumes the content providers are eager to get, not because they'd generate lots of revenue but because they'd give the content providers an absolutely exact list of their consumers, with Google no longer possessing this key to the kingdom ... of eyeball control.