Wish someone (Apple?) would figure this out
Current payment systems do not allow for lots of small fees, when credit card processors charge 25c and up per transactions.
The only way that works that I can think of would be a browser that charges a fee of say $10 per month from users and then distributes that to the pages visited, based on usage. Brave browser seemed like a step in this direction, but turned out to be just another crypto scam.
As far as I know, there is no viable solution to pay $0.01.
Which is a pitty, because $0.01 per page would be a CPM of $10 which is crazy high. For most publishers, that would be a big increase in their earnings.
The concept of a tip jar that you'd fund and then be able to disburse on participating websites.
Then payments could just be aggregated and paid out periodically from the tip jar provider to the publisher..
But you need some kind of critical mass for this (both users and publishers), and I don't think anyone has cracked this yet..
If you make a few app store transactions in a day, I believe apple aggregates these into a single transaction that's posted to the card. That model could help here, though obviously it won't help for ultra low usage though. Pre-paid models might work, but those have their own challenges, and all of this points towards a centralised gatekeeper knowing everything a user reads (or at least which top level publishers they read content from).
Also, a lot of media sites use the personal information they collect with your account for tracking, which they'd probably lose some of since they won't be the one billing you anymore.
There are micropayments that do sort of work - for example, cellphone plans that bill per megabyte of "data". But even then that only works because mobile operating systems and apps do not provide a way to anticipate data costs. There is no cost displayed next to each link you tap or YouTube video you watch. If there was, nobody would use their phones. Usage-based billing is actually one of my pet peeves for exactly this reason.
What we really want is an all-you-can-eat model that just gives us what we had back in the Advertising Will Pay For It era of news. Except that will never exist because everyone knows how platform capitalism works. Once you condition users to pay a fixed amount per month, then all the creators on your platform - or, in this case, news organizations - are playing a zero-sum game. Because they are being paid out of one pot and the only way to make that pot bigger is to do the platform's advertising job for you. This is what happened with Spotify and Netflix, with the added intrigue of the platform playing artists off one another with original content and exclusives.
On a more technical level, transaction networks are expected to provide fraud insurance, and that bills at a tune of 30 cents per transaction. Any mechanism to shave pennies off your wallet will be abused to commit untold amounts of tiny fraudulent transactions. For example, imagine installing a browser extension that, in the background, starts loading up your news articles without the user's knowledge. That's the sort of thing that will kill a microtransaction system long-term.
There are a few coins in the crypto space that could legitimately handle this, such as Nano. Its transactions are fee-less and generally confirmed in under a second.
That would probably be a proprietary solution working only on iOS and Macs with Safari. How that solves the problem for Android devices and Windows/Linux computers, maybe also for Macs with a non Safari browser?
https://whatsnewinpublishing.com/7-facts-publishers-should-k...
Apple News is apparently the #1 news app globally, but it has a free tier. Here are paid subscription trends:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1267581/apple-news-plus-...
They offer publications like Time, the Economist, and the Chicago Tribune. Unfortunately it's somewhat expensive - $0.25-$0.50 per article. And they don't have any sort of automated way to jump from a newspaper's paywall straight to the Blendle article - you've got to find it through Blendle. And there selection of publications is somewhat limited.
But there are companies out there trying to deliver something kind of close to what you're talking about!
Netflix, Amazon or Spotify could probably pull of a subscription model with their huge critical masses.
But I dont think anyone with the critical mass for a micropayment model has any motivation to do it. Google, Apple are perfectly happy with the 30% app fee, the massive cut taken from YouTube and so on.
You think you do, but you don't.
Imagine you hit that paywall, and it says "get a subscription or pay 0.50c to see this one article".
You seriously want me to believe you're gonna go bust out your wallet and punch in your credit card details and pay a fraction of a dollar instead of just closing the window and moving on?
Okay, how about we reduce the friction and do the Post.news thing: you buy tokens and then use them.
Are you really gonna go buy ten or twenty bucks worth of tokens for the few times when you hit a paid article?
Sorry, no. I don't buy it. Every time I see someone say this, it honestly just sounds like an attempt to justify busting down that paywall or refusing to subscribe. "Gee, I would have paid for this article, but I can't... oh well."
Ala carte payment friction combined with uncertainty about the value of the content (what if I pay a quarter and the article turns out to be garbage?) reduces the value of content to zero for most people. There's a reason no one has been able to make it work.
Many publishers have also stopped publishing on Blendle over the years. I guess they decided it wasn't profitable for them (or not profitable enough). The platform is still around, but I expect it won't be in a few years. It's still around, but the offering is severely reduced compared to a few years ago; I don't expect it will be around in a few years.
I do agree it's a problem; I don't really want to subscribe to one or two newspapers in particular, but rather get interesting stuff from HN and other sources from a wide variety of publications. It would be prohibitively expensive to subscribe, so, I subscribe to two publications and bypass the paywalls on the rest. I don't know what else to do beyond, I guess, just not read it at all...
It's not that Netflix wasn't a viable model, it was the companies being piggish. We see something of the sort with cable & satellite packages--companies who want to take a bigger piece of the pie and get upset when they get dropped or put into a separate package. The cost of entry into that market is so much higher that it hasn't totally fallen apart like the Netflix approach (yeah, Netflix is still out there--but the concept of being a one place for everything is gone. Too many companies want something exclusive to hope to lure you to them.)