[red_admiral]

I can't reply to the child directly due to nesting, so I'll do it here:

As far as I know, for in-person transactions ("contactless" in Europe) the economics work differently - for example SumUp quotes a flat fee of 1.69% plus a small one-time cost to buy and register the reader devices. That gets you parking meters, public toilets and the like.

However, for online credit card transactions (which are a very different risk profile, to be fair) there's a fixed cost of something like $0.20 per transaction on top of the percentage fee.

That is why, for example, substack has a minimum pricing tier of $5 for subscriptions, and why Patreon is "restructuring" because their original micropayments model wasn't breaking even.

So I agree with the parent poster that microtransactions _online_ are currently infeasible - not fundamentally impossible (Visa/MasterCard/Amex/Diners etc. could bring in a new pricing model) but it is impossible for even the NYT to set up a workable "pay $0.50 to read this artice" tier at the moment.

A kind of system where you micropay "on credit" and it's all billed once at the end of the month could, depending on the jurisdiction, make the service provider subject to regulation as a provider of financial services.

[red_admiral]

Reply to hliyan, since HN is not giving me a reply link for their post:

As far as I'm aware, a "medium-like" model works when all content you're paying for is "on the platform", this includes not just medium, but also substack, and a lot of streaming sites like twitch. There's one company involved, and one jurisdiction for settling any disputes.

Once the enities you're paying are corporations themselves - potentially based in different states - the picture becomes a lot messier; I would imagine that a system where both a reader in Germany and one in India can micropay per article for a combination of the NY Times, the Toronto Star and the South China Morning Post is beyond what current market dynamics can offer.

After all, Patreon was supposed to be the next step up from medium etc. albeit with content creators as individuals rather than corporations, and that's already struggling.

[eviks]

NYT could easily setup such a system by asking you to top up your account by a bigger amount (say, the price of a monthly sub), but only charge you cents per read article

[hliyan]

Can't a Medium-like model work -- where a third party aggregates all the credits and bills monthly?

[ixwt]

I've wondered about that. Patreon used to group all of your subscriptions into one payment, but they've recently been going away from that. I can't understand why, the small $0.20 + % adds up for multiple transactions. But if you only have to pay the $0.20 once, it effectively gets distributed across all of your subscriptions. It baffles me why Patreon went away from the single subscription model.