Micropayments as a reality check for news sites

Micropayments gives me flexibility that subscription doesn't. I'm happy to pay $5 a month just to read Matt Levin. I'm not paying $40 for Bloomberg subscription. It also gives publishers signal on what really users care about and more importantly what are they willing to pay for. Maybe, there is a truly crypto market here for micropayments without the overhead of operators like Stripe

There is a lot of hate for the idea of micropayments here, so I'd like to offer a counterpoint. I use a service that provides access to a bunch of different LLMs. Each time I call an LLM I, in effect, pay a $0.001 - $0.05 for the response. (Technically, this is implemented as me having to renew earlier.) Each time I make a call, I don't know if the answer will be useful. I don't even know how much it will cost! And in practice, the answers are often garbage, and I have to pay anyway. I find this annoying, but--to my surprise--only very mildly annoying. This has made me much more open-minded about micropayments for news / articles.

I pay for subscriptions, several, but I am never going to pay one publication a small fee every time I read an article. That model is completely counter-intuitive and punitive to the consumer.

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.

Micropayments work for games because there is some specific outcome I know I want and know paying this money will move me closer to that goal in the immediate future.

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.

Micropayments is something that I think the internet as a whole needs. However, I don't think the mental model people usually have isn't quite "micro" and frictionless enough.

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.

> We know that micropayments can work because mobile games are a thing.

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.

The title bar of the browser should report how much you've spent in the time frame you select, and the cost of a given article in both absolute and percentage terms.

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...

If micropayments have a future, it's on blockchains.

https://www.x402.org/

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

https://www.x402scan.com/

I have a patent on micropayments for the Web from 1996. 30 years later, the situation hasn't changed and Clay Shirky or Andrew Odlyzko's arguments around the mental cost of microtransactions remain valid. Besides subscriptions to individual publications, the only model that would work is a Spotify-like subscription for a bundle of sites, with the revenue shared according to page views (or better, some metric that does not reward clickbait).

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.

I get the sentiment but micropayments just don’t work - the main problems are not technical but social. Even in the gaming sector, nobody really charges less than about a dollar for items - that is the smallest unit of money where putting up with fraud, complaints, and chargebacks becomes worthwhile.

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

This does not seem to reckon with the many, MANY times this has been tried and failed. (The LinkedIn post at least acknowledges attempts that "did fail in the 90s and 2000s" and quickly waves them away.) There have been at least a dozen serious attempts in the last 20 years that I'm aware of.

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.

You know who isn't arguing for micropayments for news articles?

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.

The difference between $0.00 and $0.01 is infinite.

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

No, no, no! Micropayments are not the way.

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 Nostr model spread, actually, while most still ignore even it's existence...

I want a lie bounty. If I pay for an article and find a lie in it, I should get a refund plus a bug bounty. That would make fact-checking pay off.

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.

It's a bit dispiriting to be discussing a 30+ year old idea which in turn is built on a 60 year old idea by Ted Nelson.

I wouldn't pay for a news site, and I try to avoid looking at them, but sometimes I get sucked in.

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

Avoid at all costs.

I like the coins idea. I don't subscribe because I know I'll forget about it and it will turn into a recurring charge on my credit card. But I would buy $10 of coins, knowing the paywall just comes back if I don't buy more, and if I lose interest it won't keep costing me anything.

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

There's two possible futures

- 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.

No one reads print anymore. Most people nowadays consume their news either through a Youtube broadcast or a podcast. The news is produced for free and completely paid for through advertising. The folks using this site, we're in the (rather extreme) minority.

In my ideal world I’d subscribe to a service with a monthly subscription fee where the service takes a small cut and then converts the remainder into a use-it-or-lose-it tip balance (perhaps with the unused balance being auto-donated to a selected journalism nonprofit). In exchange for this subscription, news providers, bloggers, etc. would unpaywall their articles to me, knowing that by doing so they’re vying for a shot at getting tipped by me for their article.

If one thinks about this problem deeply, and the current solution of showing ads, you may realize that micro transactions are already “implemented”. Ads are paid for by the advertiser as mille-impressions (or conversion, etc), which works way better than demanding money at that level - and they get it no matter what. This implicit payment works way better than making consumers think about it and start the debate of value and trust and so on that everyone are debating here.

I pay for the Ground News app. It's an aggregator that (somehow) gets me all the articles on a topic, shows me how factual each source is and which way they lean politically. It summarizes the articles so I can ignore the click-bate headline and know whether I want to read more.

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.

Advertising in an SEO game. Get ranked in Google and take a few pennies from millions of drive-by users.

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.

I used to find this and the whole idea of "Web3" ridiculous, but with the recent saturation of low-quality slop and disinformation, perhaps it's time to reconsider.

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.

The person comparing LLM micropayments to news micropayments makes an interesting point. The friction tolerance is surprisingly high when the value proposition is clear and immediate.

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.

If bots could be forced to pay per crawl somehow, it would subsidize nearly all legit user traffic.

You're going to put all the work into finding the news and doing the leg work. I'm going to make a site called NewsTheft.info that just says "YourNewsSite.com is reporting that <your content rewritten by an LLM>" and it's going to be free and people are going to use my thing. Then I'm going to shut it down when you all go bust. I am a rapacious eater of worlds. You can't stop me and the people love me because, since it's free, I can give them a better experience than you.

Information wants to be free.

who the hell wants to think about micropayments every time they read an article? microtransactions just suck outright, they create a ton of overhead for everyone involved — both use and implementation

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

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> who want to bury us in deepfakes, extreme right wing bullshit

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?

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