Poster child for micropayments for news is getting out of micropayments business

After wasting millions in venture capital, the micropayments industry could have simply employed a single psychologist and saved us from a decade of micropain.

Is it possible people just don't find the product compelling enough to pay for, ever?

I feel like there's something to be said about the quality of the product from that observation.

This is interesting to me because I'm currently debating with a friend about the Canadian C-18 bill [1].

One point we are discussing is how news sites should make money. The Internet has really disrupted the business model of news organizations. When I was young, people paid subscriptions to receive the local newspaper at home every day. It was the main source of news for many, like my parents, so it made sense to pay for a subscription. Now, with Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, and such, someone can read articles from hundreds of different sources all across the globe. I don't see how anyone would pay a monthly subscription for all those sites. Paying with microtransactions might seem logical, but after reading this article, my only conclusion is that nobody wants to pay for news content nowadays, except maybe for giant organizations like the NYT and others.

Other thoughts: maybe the problem is not with the microtransactions aspect, but more with the fact that someone had to download an app to access the content in question. Do people really discover and read news on their own, or do they read it after someone else shared a link through Facebook, Reddit? Maybe the friction was just too much. I don't know; I have never used the service in question. Perhaps it would have worked if they managed to use cookies or SSO on all those sites instead of an app.

[1] https://www.parl.ca/Content/Bills/441/Government/C-18/C-18_1... TL;DR: The Online News Act lays out a framework that would require digital giants such as Google and Meta to develop agreements with Canadian news sites to provide them with compensation for sharing their online news content through links or other means.