[okennedy]

It seems like this type of approach would incentivise clickbaity articles even more than the current financing structure does. Subscribing to a newspaper is a long-term arrangement, requiring the publisher to establish and maintain the reader's trust. Articles, on the other hand, are one-time interactions. Once you start seeing enough clickbait from a given source you can avoid the source in the future, but it would be significantly harder for publishers to leverage positive trust and reputation in such a setting.

[gxon]

I would argue the opposite.

If I submit a micropayment for an article that turns out to be low effort clickbait, my disappointment will be magnified by the fact that I lost money. I would also expect my satisfaction to be magnified for high quality content. Consequently, my trust in a brand will decrement or increment accordingly. A micropayment service could even track my reactions and maintain a personalized reputation score for a publisher/brand.

Obviously, this happens now, but I don't personally have as visceral as a reaction to losing the few seconds of time as I would to losing money. Putting even a small amount of money on the line clarifies the cost of the transaction.

Long term subscriptions, on the other hand, give the publisher more wiggle room to produce lazy, low effort content. Loss of brand image needs to build up to a critical threshold that motivates me to cancel the subscription.

[julianeon]

The pressure's also going to come from the other direction. The content you pay for is also the content that goes in front of your eyeballs - and the value of that may be much more than you're paying.

Here I am, a successful content bundler. Thousands of people pay me a measly sum to see the content I push at them.

A whole bunch of people are going to come to me, with stacks full of cash, saying, Man, I sure would like to show my content to your subscribers. I calculated your profits, 100k annually. I got $1,000,000 in this check. Does that interest you?

The numbers are made up, but with adtech money being real, it won't be long before the content bundlers buckle and become 'ad-supported' or something like that.

[bobthepanda]

Heck, I don't even know if it has to be per-article; I would like the option to pay for this month and only this month, since most subscriptions are ~$5 these days.

US consumer laws don't require good, hassle free ways to end subscriptions and the main reason I haven't subscribed to any is the utter lack of desire to spend hours hashing out a cancellation with a call center employee.