Imagine a world where your web browser essentially contains and controls your wallet. You pre-pay into that wallet, say, $20. I imagine we'll probably also refer to that as "credits" so internationalization isn't so tough. So let's pretend we have 2000 credits. Now, let's start browsing the internet.

You start by conducting a web search. Perhaps there is a mechanism in HTML and the browser that basically say, "Clicking this will cost 1c". We'd probably develop a shorthand, some icon and beside it, it says the price in credits. Imagine a button like [(1c) Search].

Immediately, what is the benefit? The search engine works for you. It's like Kagi in that regard, but you didn't need to set up an account and give them your credit card information. YOU are the customer. There are no ads, they need to compete to make the search results the best, otherwise you're going somewhere else. You're no longer the product.

You see a news article in your search result. Fantastic. You visit the news website - there isn't an ad in sight. Pure news. The article starts with a title, a few lines, perhaps the first paragraph, and to read more, you click that [2c Read the Article] button. You click it, and boom, you see the entire article. No subscriptions, no popups, no ads. You are the customer. The news site wants you to be happy, not advertisers. You.

The news article discusses a new open source project that is really taking off. Cool! You click the link. Looks pretty neat! You download it, toy with it, and find that it's actually pretty useful! You go back to their repo site, and there's a little tip option. Easy peasy. You tip them 100 credits. No signing up for an account at some other site, no entering your credit card, just done and done.

I like the idea of micropayments because it makes the user the customer again. The internet has become incredibly hostile to users since we are, by and large, the product rather than the customer. We need to flip the incentive model. Does it suck to pay for things on the internet? A little. But I'd rather that and get a great experience (and also allow news organizations to have a working business model, etc) than what we have now.

What I _would _do is pay a flat fee to subscribe to several publications.

That's the only path: to give people more value than they expect for less money than they expect.

It could be multi-tiered: the more publications you subscribe to, the less each costs. So like there's the $19 plan, the $29 plan, and so on. Some tiers are even ad-free.

You'd also need to nurture all of these subscribers with a sense of community, public radio style.

This is more likely to emerge in the newsletter space than in the traditional new space. Innovator's dilemma.

That isn't the case for news content. In news it's "reading this might be interesting" or being generous "knowing this might improve my life at some point".

That delay in outcome will kill micropayments because it again goes from a very easy calculation in your mind to "too hard" like Clay talked about.

Along with silly privacy/cookie flags

Then one click you can approve both, or set a policy to auto-approve any site with minimal cookies and less than 0.01%/mo of your budget.

Then ideally when you're done you click red/yellow/green buttons to close the site, indicating whether you were happy with the result. (And set your policy to avoid sites you dissed.)

Then also when you hover over a link you get a pop-up with the same rate and quality info, as text or icons.

It's easy and provable at small to large scales. It just takes coordination.

As motivation, this could enable site-side price discrimination, to maximize revenue. That could drive privacy features...

Paying $1.00 for an in app purchase that you thought about and decided on is not a micropayment, that's just a small payment.

What makes micropayments interesting is that they can be small enough to escape notice, except in aggregate. They happen in the background, tightly coupled to the thing they're for, and not as part of an explicit purchase that added friction to the consumer's day.

I think there's probably a lot of potential to simplify things with micropayments. Like perhaps rather than paying my mobile provider to maintain a web of relationships with regional network operators and distribute money to them on cadence which has nothing to do with my usage of their network, I could instead just attach some money to each packet and transmit it to the lowest bidder in range (payment stays in escrow until packet delivered, then pays all operators involved). It could be that by cutting out the middleman I pay less and the network operators get more.

That's not what this is about though.

https://www.x402.org/

https://www.8004scan.io/networks

https://www.x402scan.com/

If they don't want to be stiffed on royalties like how musicians get pennies from Spotify, news sites will need to establish some sort of co-op to host this, and not rely on the likes of Meta or Apple, as tech companies have proven treacherous to the news biz many, many times before.

Add to this the huge race to the bottom (they are charging 3 cents for their article, read my summary for 2 cents) and you quickly begin to see why micropayments have never taken off.

Finally, I wrote a blog post along these lines with more detail[0]. For those who disagree, ask yourselves; would you pay me 2 cents before you click that link.

[0] https://sheep.horse/2024/11/on_micropayments.html

Pretty much every damn publisher.

Nobody who wants to build a stable business would want to depend on micropayments.

Such a system would be a race to the bottom, just like garnering "Facebook likes" and similar "virality" is a failing proposition. (And look at what happened to companies like Buzzfeed, who were focused on just this.)

We have a huge problem in our society, of people not valuing journalism, and not wanting to pay for it. Here on HN you regularly see people attempt to actively subvert copyright (by linking to "archive sites"), in addition to the constant drip of criticism when publishers do things to try to build their business, such as collect email addresses, use paywalls, etc.

Publishers need reliable, stable, income, not the lottery type system that would come from micropayments. They need to be paid to do journalism, not write articles that convince people to spend "coins" on them.

Fortunately, publishers are actually figuring out how to build stable businesses. There's still a lot of work to do, especially in terms of local journalism, but it's clear that there is no future for micropayments, based on what seems to actually work.

And please, I beg you, set aside a budget to support journalists, and spend it.

What about Blendle? They had NYT, WaPo and WSJ as launch partners in 2014 but give up on micropayments in 2023 citing "very low demand"

Or Flattr. Or Invisibly. Or Pico. Or Brave's goofy crypto token. Or Coil. The Washington Post themselves experimented with cheap "day passes" a few years ago but I guess they didn't work well enough to keep. Arguably Medium's rev share program was another failed attempt. Heck no less a content middleman powerhouse than Apple tried and mostly failed to do a rev share / micropayments scheme with Apple News.

But I’m really curious how bad the free experience would have to become before people are open to paying a pittance?

We already know the way. It's the cable/streaming model.

You pay for a single monthly subscription and get access to substantially all of the major news content.

What would need to happen for this to be possible? Cooperation between most of the major news outlets. Not cooperation in an anti-competitive sense, but willingness to participate in this sort of business model.

I'm a former news editor and left the industry because the business side couldn't figure out a viable business model.

I realize and feel deeply the loss we experience (especially at the local and state level) when quality journalism dies out, and I would love for the industry to recover.

But they're not going to do it unless they recognize that single-site subscriptions (or micropayment transactions) aren't going to cut it.

The news is toxic propaganda, and nothing more. Nothing actionable.

Avoid at all costs.

When I see the "$1 introductory offer" I just think they are trying to trick me.

A real problem is that most of the fact-oriented sources are paywalled, while the polemic sites, especially on the hard right, are free. Fox News and X are free, but the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal are paywalled.

- give up capitalism for information, and rely on UBI and gov grants for art and media

- make the market great again with micropayments and subscriptions

Both of these have problems, but also both are better than ads, which have been an unmitigated disaster.

I'm honestly not sure why this isn't the standard. It solved all my news problems and fills all my news needs.

I'm honestly not sure what these tiny news sites that have paywalls are thinking. The chances of me paying a monthly fee for news from a single source, let alone a tiny, local, single source, are less than zero.

I enjoy reading thorough publications written by actual humans who have something to say. Part of why I'm here. And I'd take micropayments over subscriptions anytime.

There's just one catch nobody seems to be eager to talk about. While I'm willing to pay that 1¢, if it's 1¢ + any identifying information, I'm out.

Subscriptions is a loyalty game. Convince users of your value and get them to commit to becoming a supporter for an extended period. Get them to install an app, accept breaking news alerts and lean on you as a trusted source.

Micropayments is neither. There's no obvious path to generate consistent micropayment revenue. Maybe for like long-form features, but not for daily newsrooms.

The real blocker has always been payment rails, not willingness. Credit card processing makes anything under ~$0.30 economically irrational. Lightning Network and L2 stablecoins have changed that math completely — sub-cent transactions with near-zero fees are live today.

The bundling debate is a red herring. What killed micropayments in 2005 was Visa minimums, not user psychology. Now that the infrastructure exists for actual sub-penny settlement, the experiment deserves a rerun with modern rails.

Information wants to be free.

not to mention that they're fundamentally incompatible with the american credit card cabal, which forces you into buying some goofy monopoly money that you're likely to overspend on regularly

It's a shame with articles like this that are otherwise insightful, they just lose me with sentences like that.

Like, if you don't have enough insight to recognize that bullshit is a general political issue, and has been forever, how can I rely on any other analysis you make?