[creinhardt]

Having worked in this space from the publisher side for a bit, I can tell you that many paywall vendors tried the micro transaction approach, and the friction level was just too high for it to ever catch on at the scale needed to sustain a business. Definitely too much for a local newspaper or tv station site, the juice was never worth the squeeze.

[TylerE]

I worked at a small group of local dallies doing IT/Dev stuff about 15 years ago. Just the struggles we had dealing with very basic login/password with a large fraction of our userbase...

Also, a subscription was much more valuable than a read because that's the number advertisers mostly cared about. Drive bys only coming in because something went a bit national weren't really valuable clicks as they weren't locals and are never gonna buy a car from Jim Bob's Chevrolet or get cremated at the Johnson Funeral Home.

[amanaplanacanal]

Not sure i want to pay to read an article and then also have to see an ad too. Maybe. I sure won't put up with that for video content.

[bruce511]

Very much this.

I can see some number of people are happy to pay a few cents to read something. I'm guessing it's a minority, but hey it's something.

Problem though is that the first transaction is really expensive in time and effort. Download the payments app, sign up, register credit card, seed the account, install browser extension etc. All this assuming I know the payments system exists and assuming there's only 1 of them.

So what was the article about? How could it possibly be enticing enough to make it worth this hassle?

Sure, the second and later times it's easy (assuming the same micro-service is used, and assuming the paywall supports micro at all) but I never bother with the first so this gain is never there.

[em-bee]

this is why payment integrated into wechat is a success. everyone (in china) has wechat already, and sending a few cents worth is trivial. heck, you can even give money to beggars using wechat. and you don't even need to connect a bank account to get started.

the problem is of course that outside of china we don't have that dominance of a single app that everyone already has. and we would need to build something federated to drive adoption, which is hard. (mobile payment in china is not federated. alternatives to wechat only work because of the country's huge population and because they are also popular for other reasons, like alibaba which was eventually able to build alipay because of that. and of course alibaba doesn't accept wechat pay.)

i think a key feature for wechat pay gaining popularity was that it allows people to send money to each other, and therefore it was not dependent on service providers adopting it. it probably also helped that china has a culture of giving money as a gift.

another approach is mobile money https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_Money which apparently is popular in africa.

[jeroenhd]

Many countries have easy, accessible systems already. I can transfer single eurocents to everyone I have an IBAN for, and it'll appear on their bank account in seconds. Places like the US seem to prefer some kind of hybrid system where their bank integrates with one or more different companies to deal with doing easy bank transfers. The biggest problem right now is that you'd need to implement paying and receiving money for every single country's payment culture.

There is an EU initiative (Wero) to unify payment methods at least across the EU, but that's far from finished. Because this system directly integrates with banks, EU citizens won't need to download a separate app to store money in (or connect your bank account to); just the standard banking app you probably have on your phone already will do. It would make integrating micropayments for a large part of Europe very easy.

On the other hand, you'd still need to pay per transaction as a business (a flat fee or a percentage or a combination of both, depending on your bank), so you wouldn't get €0.05 news articles. Without a method to aggregate these payments, traditional banking will still be quite dead.

In truth, I don't think people will pay for news even if it's just one click of a button. People don't value news all that much, and the shady propaganda machines make a lot of "news" available for free, a rate no real newspaper can compete with.

[em-bee]

SEPA is nice, except until recently my bank charged me money to use it (fortunately they changed that now). but i don't want to use my bank account for micro payments. i do want a separate wallet for that. my bank account has a credit card that works like that. if i want to use the credit card i have to actively load up money from my bank account before i can use it. i want the same for a digital wallet. i do not want to use my banking app where i receive my income for that. in my case i don't use the phone for online banking at all for the same reason.

simply sending money from my bank account would also not be practical. the whole point is that you can make small payments need to be fast without any security checks. online banking does not (and should not) allow that with your regular online banking account. there needs to be a separate app with a limited wallet that can't do anything but make small payments until the wallet is empty.