[kelnos]

I think it's a little more nuanced than that. I would be fine paying per-article on a lot of news sites, if the cost was on the order of single-digit cents.

I consume most of my news via aggregators like HN, so I have no loyalty to any particular news site. I'm not going to pay $30/mo for a subscription when I read maybe 5-10 articles on a site per month, at most. And I'm certainly not going to pay for subscriptions to, say, the 15-20 different news sites that show up with that frequency on aggregators, with headlines I'm likely to click on.

Put another way, let's say I read 10 articles per day, so about 300 per month. Those articles are spread across a lot of different sites, let's say probably 100 of them, ranging from single article from random blogs, up to 7 articles from a larger publication like WaPo or WSJ.

At even 10 cents per article, on average, that's $30/mo, total. I'm comfortable with that. In contrast, with the current "system", if I had to subscribe to even 15 of those medium to large publications, at, say, $15/mo, that's $225/mo, which I'm absolutely not comfortable with. At that point -- assuming there were no ways to bypass paywalls -- I'd simply just do without, and find other free sources covering the same stories.

But still, I don't think micropayments will work, even if the friction is pretty low. There is a surprisingly huge psychological gulf between free and even one cent. Once you ask someone for money, they are going to agonize (even if just a little bit) over whether or not the article they're about to read is actually worth it.

[alisonatwork]

This is exactly the same problem that happened with streaming services. When there was only one streaming service that had most of the stuff on it, a lot of people felt it was reasonable to pay $15 per month. But then the streaming services splintered and it would now cost n * $15 per month to watch the exact same shows you were watching before.

The economics of it make sense from the perspective of the creators, but they don't from the perspective of the consumers. Creators need enough cash that they can afford to survive flops, but consumers only want to pay for hits. This is why I think micropayments will never be a great solution for TV, journalism etc.

As a consumer, I can see the appeal of taking a Robin Hood approach. Pay for one streaming service and pirate the rest. Pay for one newspaper subscription and bypass paywalls on the rest. Adblock all of the things. If the law of big numbers holds then all of the content providers with at least some content worth consuming should end up getting fairly compensated. If those economics don't work out, then neither would micropayments anyway.