[drags]

On the psychology, I think it's more a positioning problem than a cost problem. For instance, I'm more than happy to pay $0.10 on Lala to listen to a song, but that's because all of my purchases are collected in such a way that they're easy to return to later. As a result it feels like I'm paying for some kind of ownership.

I think it's much harder to conceptualize paying for a news article as providing some sort of ownership interest. Fact is, there are several authors and essays I read over and over again, but that's probably less than 1% of my internet reading. You're basically asking me to pay to own something I don't want to own.

Granted, news orgs are spinning micropayments as paying for a service, but each individual article fits more naturally into my idea of product (tangible, doesn't really change) than service.