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Comment by Drew_ | Hacker News Reader

I've been thinking about this for a few years. It blows my mind that publications are not selling articles a la carte. Surely getting _some_ revenue from readers that don't want to subscribe is better than none at all? It feels like a great way to generate leads that might convert into subscriptions as well.

This is not some genius new idea so surely publications have thought about it and refused it, but for what reason?

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Here's what I can think of for why not:

- Hard to predict/forecast recurring revenue (though it's additional revenue)

- Incentivizes click baiting for readers

- Requires setting up a "non-standard" billing system

The stopper (or at least one) is probably credit card transaction fees. There is usually a minimum fee of like 15¢ which makes it less feasible to do transactions under a dollar.

Accumulate and bill once per month. Or pre-pay.

Agreed - pre-pay. I'd pay $5-10 easy and let it run out slowly over time

The papers should offer their own card

The fee comes from the payment processor. There's no way to avoid it while providing credit card services without starting your own payment processing company (at which point you're then eating those costs directly).

FedNow should help in the longer term as non-credit card payment methods show up that use it, but it's still not going to get to the realm of 10¢ micropayments (the service has a flat $0.045 per transaction fee, and companies still have to then consider their own service cost overheads on top of that).

Good point though I’m personally willing to pay more for articles. For example a big feature article from a reputable publication is easily worth $10+ to me. Smaller reports would be less but still at least $1.

Obviously that’s very expensive compared to a subscription but that’s kind of the point.

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