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Comment by nradov | Hacker News Reader

After 30+ years of web publishing we still have no viable system for content micropayments. There's just no way I will sign up for any more monthly subscriptions; those build up and eat you alive. But I would be happy to pay a small amount to read an individual article if it was a frictionless one-click process. There have been many attempts to crack that problem but so far all have failed.

https://www.nngroup.com/articles/the-case-for-micropayments/

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And there's an argument (almost certainly correct) from 25 years ago that the problem with microtransactions was that there's a mental transaction cost associated with every 5 cent payment. https://archive.is/fzL0I

Small $$ subscriptions are a different variant of the same problem.

To be fair, many of us used to have a bunch of magazine subscriptions--some of which were only $1-2 per month but I'm not sure the same mindset still applies.

We do see things like Apple News+ that aggregate non-free content and perhaps that's something of a solution. We'll see. I do pay for the New York Times and The Economist but I mostly won't subscribe to individual sites online.

Maybe this is true but it would be nice to have a technical solution in place that would facilitate a 5 cent payment so people could experiment with it. The US treasury of FED should do it at this point as it seems no one else will.

Many startup failures in the dot-com era. Not sure why this should be a US Treasury service given there's a well-developed financial system in the US that facilitates lots of other payment options. (And have you ever looked at the hilariously barely late 90s website of TreasuryDirect?)

I'm also not sure I want the US government deciding which publications are proper participants in an official micropayments scheme.

Blendle is 20-50 cents per article. I doubt that lowering their prices to 5 cents would make a material difference.

In China, the online literature industry represented by qidian.com is a typical model of charging by word count: a few cents RMB per 1000 words. If you subscribe to a novel with several million words in full, you will find that the final cost far exceeds buying a physical book. I subscribe to three or five online entertainment novels for fun and relaxation all year round, because reading them only takes a few minutes of fragmented time every day, so this price is acceptable. But I think this word count payment model is difficult to replicate in serious news or more formal opinion articles, because users do not have much motivation to subscribe daily, and this fee is too low, and also need to pay attention to piracy issues. Novels are not very meaningful if they are not copied in full. But for a single article, it is very easy to be copied away for 5 cents and made public on the Internet. <This comment is translated by new bing.>

Because they aren't and never will be "micro". Every single media I saw trying this eventually comes to the multiple dollars, or tens of dollars per single purchase of a single digital item (post, video, recording etc). That's not sustainable for majority of people, and of course fails. Unless a specific type of people become interested in it, commonly known as "whales", who can sustain a lot of expensive single purchases. And it's a reinforcing loop - since more money comes from a few "money is no issue" crowd, creators are increasing prices to extract more money from this crowd, more people are filtered out and more whales are left, the prices increase again and so on.

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