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Comment by teraku | Hacker News Reader

It doesn't work.

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

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A possibility would be a (global, publication independent) subscription service like this: you pay a fixed amount in each month (say, ten dollars). Then every time you read an article from a website that subscribes to the service, if you liked the article you click on a widget. At the end of the month, the ten dollars are redistributed to the publishers in proportion to your clicks. So payment is voluntary but the total amount per month is already allocated- it's not a matter of deciding whether to pay or not but just how to distribute the money.

I fully support this. But publishing houses don't. They don't see the benefit.

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.

Not sure what the publishing houses would think about this, but how's the collaboration needed? You can create the service and distribute the widget; and if at first it will be used only by independent bloggers I don't see the issue. More commercial players might use it too if they think it can increase their revenues- maybe test it for a subset of articles at first.

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.

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