[kriro]

The model seems to work and they seem to have great traction. I can see all the objections but the proof is in the pudding. Really liked this sentence from their answer to a critic:

"""You said you talked about the idea of Blendle when I was two years old. But Blendle is not an “idea”. Blendle is about execution. And because of that we’ve gathered more than 140.000 users in The Netherlands with a $0 marketing budget."""

Seems somewhat reasonable to assume this could be transfered to the hyperbroken academic publishing model (publisher resistence is a lot higher and older articles are worth more than for typical newspaper stuff though). One source, micropayment per article, refund policy. One can dream ;)

[phreeza]

Here is an even crazier idea: (micro)pay to cite instead of (micro)pay to read. Just going to put that out there.

[kriro]

That's actually a pretty cool idea. Once there's infrastructure in place, it's easy to enforce, too. Turn in a paper and upon acceptance you are billed for the citations. Money = reputation also kind of works and is a nice incentive to write good papers that get cited often.

[downside is obviously that it kind of also creates an incentive to cite less]