I'd like more microtransactions and would gladly pay a few cents or even a dollar to read a good article.
The business model is to bundle everything together, for a long subscription - most want at least a month, perhaps a year, full subscription.
The business model is to bundle everything together, for a long subscription - most want at least a month, perhaps a year, full subscription.
Do you really want a world with even more clickbait headlines and articles artificially spread over 20 pages? Because that's what microtransactions would lead to.
Because what if you pay 0.5$ for an article, and then you find out it's not what you expected/badly written/...
You basically are not happy and less likely to do it again. If you put payment to the end, then people are less willing to pay, because they already consumed the article. You can't take the information out of the head again if he's not willing to pay.
It's a tricky thing
Also with the a volunteer voting system you could use that to signal to people without a subscription what articles were "good", "controversial", ... to increase chances of a "buy-per-page" for like 10 cents per article.
Or something, I feel like the possibilities are vast, but publishing houses need to collaborate. Which they don't like to.
I understand that the idea has tons of limitations but it might solve the issue of micropayments with their tiny amounts and the constant need to decide whether to pay or not to pay.