Micropayments do not work. They've been tried over and over, but generally speaking, they aren't helpful. Users don't really use them, and they don't actually help the publisher/author long term.
FWIW I've been working on a startup with a different vision, but trying to make news profitable: https://blog.forth.news/a-business-model-for-21st-century-ne...
Most importantly, the cost has to be no more than the site would get for serving that visitor ads.
This is where the break is. On a per content or per month basis, sites want to charge individuals orders of magnitude more than they charge advertisers. No avid reader (those most likely to be happy to pay!) can afford the same footprint of reading that content is happy to give them through ads. And so, content is writing for ads, not readers.
It's self defeating.
. . .
PS. I bookmarked https://www.forth.news/topstories ... it's not how I find / read content, I need much higher density (somewhere between https://upstract.com/ and https://www.techmeme.com/) and if I want a personal feed, there's feedly and its kin, but what I personally do is something like this socially curated discovery except generated by a process something like Yahoo Pipes that scavenges an array of tentacles into the newsosphere. But I see what you're doing there.
This kind of experimentation is awesome. Will come back and see how hard it is to "make it my own". Thanks for sharing your position essay!
Then, the middle man who sets this up goes all Apple and says they rule the customer experience, they bring all the value, and they're entitled to eat 30% of everything because reasons.
Then, they either become a huge monopoly, like Apple, for as long as they can keep consumers and producers captive, or for some reason (regulation, actual competition) some other huge business gets into it and balkanizes it (like Netflix, which was a “good” middleman for consumers, until 10 other 800lb gorillas got in there, and now it's worse than à la carte cable).
I'm saying all this is built into your platform of choice, both IAP frameworks available on your platform of choice, and browsers available through that platform's distribution of choice, therefore let publishers register with the platforms (or post keys and coordinates in DNS, or whatever), and the platforms distribute that to the publishers.
Google shouldn't even care if they lose a percentage of ad revenue if they get the same percentage of direct subscription. Meanwhile, Apple gets the benefit of pennies per traffic (not a cash flow they are in today) without the tarnish of being for the advertisers instead of the users and creators.
Brave (with BAT) and others have toyed with such models, but they're from the wrong vantage, and the marketplace needs too many legs of the stool built to bootstrap. Leveraging legs that are already there could make this plausible.
That said, this point --
> Most importantly, the cost has to be no more than the site would get for serving that visitor ads.
is the disconnect. The ads aren't providing enough revenue to be self-sufficient. Hence the paywalls.
Most folks never look up from the adwords grind to consider that the whole existing ecosystem is misguided, and something from before might be better.
Excessive rent extraction, and content that targets ad revenue instead of sustained interest, seem to be where most sustainability gets lost. An auction engine at the heart of both these broken models accelerates the enrichment of the rent extractors and the decline of sustainability.