> What we desperately need is a real, useful micro-payments model where you can pay per-article.
Former news editor here. I have spent a loooong time thinking about how to help my beloved news industry find a payment model that works. I've become convinced that a "cable subscription" model has more promise than a micropayments model.
Here's what's wrong with a micropayments model. Each microtransaction is an additional cost incurred by the user, and in many models that cost can vary based on the website visited and other factors. And so every single time you choose to engage in a microtransaction, you have to do some brief mental gymnastics to determine whether the transaction is valuable enough to you to proceed. It may be only a few cents, so for many people it's not a big deliberation, but the decision is always there, every time.
The benefit of this approach is that there's very little economic waste involved; you pay only for what you buy. But it encourages stingy, penny-pinching behavior, and that's horrible for adoption. If you want broad, mass-market support, it's a big problem.
Under the cable subscription model, you pay a fixed monthly fee for access to a large number of "channels," and in return you can access those channels as much as you want.
Under the hood, that subscription fee can be doled out to each channel based on how much it's accessed, or divided equally, or by some other method in between. But to the end user, it's an all-you-can-eat buffet, and they just don't need to think about it. Part of the fee they're paying is for content itself and part of it is for the convenience of not having to regulate usage.
The downside of this approach is that there's more economic waste involved; some light users won't get their money's worth and will end up subsidizing heavy users. But it discourages stingy behavior, and that's great for adoption.
Later on down the line, once the cable-subscription model has been widely adopted, the market will eventually demand more a la carte payment models (we see this happening right now in the fairly mature cable television industry).
But for right now, widespread adoption should be the primary focus of any online payment model. Ultimately, a good number of the major U.S. news publishers would need to get on board, and to date they have been relatively unwilling to cooperate (which may be due to regulatory hurdles). But I'm pretty sure that's what needs to happen. Less sure whether it will be enough to save the industry.