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It’s unfortunate we haven’t solved the micro-payment problem. Crypto was an obvious solution but anything would require a hefty network effect. But imagine like a starbucks card or whatever you have your micropayment card, and it auto reloads when it hits zero with 20 bucks or whatever. When you visit the times, a modal pops up, “This article costs $0.02. Read it? y/n or $1 for a day pass”. Sure pirates will get around it but they already do. Just make it grandma easy and you’re done. It’s just the money probably isn’t good enough for VC dollars to roll something out with enough big players to jump in.

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That model doesn't really work, unfortunately:

https://www.amediaoperator.com/newsletter/microtransactions-...

It has been tried a bunch of times. I think a core problem is unlike most micro transaction opportunities you're asking customers to pay money to be told bad news. To buy something that will make them miserable. There's a fundamental disconnect there that means people aren't going to be inclined to do it.

The conclusion of that article is that the model doesn't work because of processing fees and friction from entering information.

The author discounts Bitcoin because it has high fees, but some cryptos have 0 fees and others have very low fees. With crypto you also don't need to enter any information, simply scan the QR code and enter the amount you'd like to pay.

If crypto was adopted, the model would work just fine.

Personally, I always donate 10 cents to a dollar in Monero when I read an article[1] that I enjoyed that offers crypto donation addresses. Primal[2] has built a crypto wallet into their app and you can see people send "zaps" of Bitcoin when they appreciate a post and it has adoption.

[1] https://www.therage.co/letter-1-keonne-rodriguez/

https://www.therage.co/donate/

https://zola.ink

[2] https://primal.net/maxhillebrand/pop-ch01#:~:text=2%2C184

Acquiring and managing crypto is its own form of friction though.

This is a different model though. This is a single site doing micro transactions which I agree doesn’t work. But a global/general one doesn’t exist and probably would be fine. It would have the same friction as adding moves on a phone game or whatever and reload minimums would handle the fees.

Again, it’s been tried. Look at Scroll or Blendle. They failed.

I never saw either as a purchase option on any major newspaper or site. It’s a chicken and egg problem. You need to be large enough to be able to get big name partners on board to seed the network.

Edit: in reality this already exists. Amazon/Apple Pay/Google Play already have reloadable gift cards/accounts. Just like using it on the web, click yes to pay ten cents with whatever. The accounts can still be used to buy whatever. Done. Just have to gate it to gift cards accounts.

Blendle was largely targeted in the Netherlands and Germany so if you’re in the US it isn’t surprising that you didn’t see it. But it had major publishers on board and it failed.

But you’re right, it’s a chicken and egg problem that won’t get resolved. If an org is already making money via subscription they have no incentive to do micropayments.

Patreon is probably the closest successful model of this. A indie newspaper could maybe launch via it. That’s basically newsletters today in a way.

An approach that might work is low cost yearly subscriptions. So $6 a year instead of per month. Cost to the consumer becomes $0.50 a month for services that scale well (like news), but avoids the service fee and money laundering problems of micropayments.

> This article costs $0.02. Read it?

See this sounds excellent to me. In order to make it work for the boardroom though, it'd be more like $0.50/article or $0.99 for "breaking news".

I can imagine the math being roughly "Divide the monthly cost by the amount of articles an average user reads per month. Now slide it up to look round"

Maybe I'm being cynical, but I think the economics would break down pretty quick, right?

There is no micro-payment problem from the perspective of the vast majority of publishers. They simply don't want it. End of story.

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