18 Feb 2026In Digital Media Lost the Newsstand. Micropayments Are the Obvious Way Back, Rick Bruner makes the case for giving micropayments another try. The internet has dramatically diversified…
18 Feb 2026
In Digital Media Lost the Newsstand. Micropayments Are the Obvious Way Back, Rick Bruner makes the case for giving micropayments another try.
The internet has dramatically diversified reading patterns. In the print era, readers subscribed to a small, fixed set of publications constrained by geography, distribution, and cost. Today, thanks to search, aggregators, and social sharing, readers routinely consume journalism from dozens of sources in the course of a month, including international and niche publications that were previously inaccessible. This has expanded total news consumption while weakening the economic link between any individual reader and any individual publisher. As a result, large portions of valuable readership generate little or no direct revenue. Micropayments convert that fragmented, currently untapped demand into incremental revenue without undermining the subscription base.
And—like any other payments directly from readers—micropayments would be a multiplier for advertising, not an alternative.
In a marketplace increasingly distorted by bot activity and opaque platform reporting, micropayment histories give publishers a powerful, independent way to demonstrate the authenticity and engagement of their audience, strengthening their position with advertisers and supporting premium pricing.
The 404 Media team explains the value of a known human audience in We Need Your Email Address. Meanwhile, Subscription revenue is growing at big news publishers even as traffic shrinks, and that’s good news for legit sites—stuck in a struggle for ad budgets with Big Tech oligarchs who want to bury us in deepfakes, extreme right wing bullshit and AI slop until nobody trusts anybody.
Clay Shirky’s old argument against micropayments from 2003, based on mental transaction costs, doesn’t work so well any more. We know that micropayments can work because mobile games are a thing. Shirky was probably right for the micropayments of his day, but mobile game developers have figured out how to get people to spend money on in-app-purchases (IAP), by turning it into a two-step process.
exchange real money for in-game coins—which feels like you’re not spending, just exchanging one currency for another.
exchange in-game coins for an in-game asset—which feels like you’re not spending real money.
A brilliant cognitive trick that works in all kinds of games. Of course, it doesn’t work on everybody. Figure about half of adults play mobile games, and about 80 percent of those make an in-app purchase. But if the numbers for a pay by the article system were similar, that would result in enough payment records to enable an advertiser to tell a legit site—where somebody spends a coin every so often—apart from an AI slop site.
So it doesn’t seem like micropayments are necessarily unworkable—and with a powerful industry devoted to pushing misinformation and slop, legit content needs every human attention metric it can get—but the tricky part is how to introduce micropayments. Publishers look at their subscriber metrics and realize that a lot of subscribers read few enough stories that they would save a lot of money by canceling and using micropayments instead.
It might be better to introduce publisher coins as a bonus feature for subscribers, then let them leak out to non-subscribers. Instead of saying that you get 5 gift articles per month, say a gift article is 20 coins and you get 100 free coins a month. Then open them up to more uses. Another good lesson from how mobile games handle IAP coins is that they hand out a few to non-buyers to help develop the habit. As part of a direct sold ad deal, legit sites could issue a stack of coins to legit advertisers, to hand out to customers, event visitors, and others.
Measuring marketing is already hard enough without a determined set of adversaries in the picture. And with Big Tech under pressure to obfuscate and enshittify every data flow, marketers will need to look harder for trustworthy information. Rick Bruner again:
ROI for most advertisers is falling in inverse proportion to Big Tech valuations going up. Advertisers are steadily paying more for less ROI, and Google, Meta, and Amazon are laughing all the way to the blockchain.
If there is one thing marketers have even heard about causation — which, of course, is the ultimate point of advertising, causing consumers to buy your product who wouldn’t have otherwise — it is that correlation is not causation. But AI, you see, is nothing but correlation. Very fast and very sophisticated statistical inference. The fact remains that to truly know what is having an effect, you need to conduct a randomized experiment: subjects assigned at random to a test or control group, presented with an intervention where they are either treated or not with the stimulus of interest (the ad), and measured against the outcome of interest (incremental sales).
Unfortunately, legit sites are on a clock here. Right now the Big
Tech companies are quietly
pushing an in-browser advertising attribution tracking system
through the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). It’s a complicated
proposal, technically, but it aims to centralize attribution measurement
at one chokepoint per browser vendor, so we can safely predict what the
attribution reports are going to look like. beep, boop, the
optimal place to spend your ad money is . . . whatever Performance Max
(or other Big Tech ML) says is the right place to spend your ad
money. If any attribution tracking reports start to come out
looking favorable to legit sites—and potentially costing Big Tech’s
misinfo and slop operations billions—then management will just demand
changes to code, policies, and personnel until the numbers come out the
way they want.
The survival of legit sites depends on how quickly marketers can level up to stuff like rickcentralcontrolcom/geo-rct-methodology and not just dump money and customer data in to Big Tech and get conversions out. The problem with marketing today isn’t that marketers have gotten “too technical” and ignored the creative mystique or whatever—it’s that marketers are so afraid to look “non-technical” by asking the hard questions.
Anyway, just going back and reading this, Rick Bruner has scored a content marketing win here. Start people off thinking about micropayments, and that ends up leading to the question of how to figure out which sites are for real, in the presence of so many gatekeepers with an interest in pushing the wrong answers? (and destroying the legit economy and crushing democracy, but that’s another story).
Right now a lot of sites have a lot of, let’s just say malarkey to get through before seeing the actual page.
“consent” dialogs (which don’t get real consent anyway, as Prof. Daniel Solove explains)
Email newsletter signups
Prompts to allow notifications
Sign in with (company name here)
A micropayment platform that can either eliminate those or act as a front end for them, to consolidate on zero or one roadblock to get through before reading, would be a user experience (and revenue) win. Piling another thing to click onto already long-suffering users is not the way to get people back to the web. More: time to sharpen your pencils, people
What’s
next for Chinese open-source AI by Caiwei Chen. The adoption of
Chinese models is picking up in Silicon Valley, too. Martin Casado, a
general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, has put a number on it: Among
startups pitching with open-source stacks, there’s about an 80% chance
they’re running on Chinese open models….
(related: Please
Don’t Say Mean Things about the AI That I Just Invested a Billion
Dollars In, generative ai
antimoats)
Why the World Is Drawing a Line on Social Media for Kids by Jon Haidt. (As far as I know, teens in Australia can still make GitHub and Wikipedia accounts. How did they manage to slice the definition of “social media”?)
EU
Parliament blocks AI features over cyber, privacy fears by Ellen
O’Regan and Max Griera. The latest move to switch off AI tools
concerns built-in features like writing and summarizing assistants,
enhanced virtual assistants and webpage summaries in both tablets and
phones, an EU official said, granted anonymity to disclose details of
the security policy.
Journalism
Is Dead. Long Live Journalism by Rebecca Solnit. Silicon Valley
created and abets this chaos, both by undermining the financial basis
for traditional news by siphoning away its advertising revenue and
audiences, and by creating tools and platforms where, over and over,
from Facebook to Substack, the bosses insist they are defending free
speech by not filtering out dangerous disinformation and hate
speech.
EPIC
Crafts 2026 Model Bill to Bolster Age-Appropriate Design Code Laws
by Austin Jenkins. EPIC, which filed an amicus brief in the
California case, said its model bill was
carefully designed
to
avoid First Amendment issues and was built off of Vermont’s law, which
was passed last year after input from EPIC staff.
People
who use chatbots for news consider them unbiased and “good enough,” new
study finds | Nieman Journalism Lab by Andrew Deck. The study
found that right now even regular chatbot users aren’t relying on them
alone for news. Most interviewees continued to access traditional news
sources, while using chatbots to supplement these habits.
Read the original article
Comments
By munificent 2026-02-200:4623 reply Let's say a journalist writes an excellent article about something political of serious import. I'm fine with paying for that article to get access to it.
But, really, the article is a lot more useful to me if other people can access it too. Since everyone can vote, I want the whole populace to be informed, even poor people.
I wonder if there is a viable business model where for each article, readers can pay to unlock it not just for themselves, but for everyone. The price would obviously have to be higher since you aren't just buying it for yourself. But perhaps the sense of "I'm helping build a better-informed world and helping broadcast my values" would encourage people to pay that higher price.
Maybe you could do something cumulative and Kickstarter-like where there's a threshold for the article to be unlocked and anyone can chip in to getting it over the line. This would take advantage of human psychology that we like being part of something bigger than ourselves.
And it would hopefully have the emergent property that news that people feel is actually valuable gets spread more widely than useless junk.
You could even list the names of the sponsors of the article when it gets unlocked (if they didn't want to be anonymous). How cool would be to one of the people who helped an important story "break"?
I wonder if there is a viable business model where for each article, readers can pay to unlock it not just for themselves, but for everyone. The price would obviously have to be higher since you aren't just buying it for yourself. But perhaps the sense of "I'm helping build a better-informed world and helping broadcast my values" would encourage people to pay that higher price.
What you're asking for is the system we already have, except at a micro level rather than a macro level. Rich people buy out newspapers to signal-boost their own preferred messages to the public.
I think it's questionable that the "news that people feel is actually valuable" is what really ought to be spread. Some of the most valuable news is local reporting on the daily business of municipal governments. Regular people are notoriously uninterested in local politics, despite the outsized impact it has on their lives. Many of the most mundane decisions made in municipal councils go completely unnoticed yet they can destroy whole communities in the long run.
>Many of the most mundane decisions made in municipal councils go completely unnoticed yet they can destroy whole communities in the long run.
They go unnoticed because of scaling issues, not because people are per se less interested in local politics than national politics. If you write a story about a decision on the local city council, it is of interest to maybe a few hundred thousand, whereas a story about Congress is of interest to tens of millions. Even if people were ten times as interested in local news (as measured by their willingness to subscribe or the amount of ads they are willing to be exposed to), it would still make more sense to send a reporter to the Capitol before City Hall.
I think a lot of our issues today are because people are too engaged in federal politics. It's turned into a massive spectacle on the same level as the NFL.
That seems to be the point; WWE USA: Blue Team vs Red Team, The Democracy Simulation Show. Everyone has the same and equal meaningless vote.
By mschuster91 2026-02-209:325 reply > Everyone has the same and equal meaningless vote.
There is one vote that is not meaningless: the primaries. A lot of the issues y'all have is that Democrats and Republicans alike don't bother to vote in the primaries. That is how you got people like MTG or Trump, that is how you get people like Chuck Schumer stuck in office for far too long.
AOC/The Squad and Mamdani both proved that it is possible to succeed in a primary and offer voters an actual alternative to the corporate owned shills.
By thatcat 2026-02-2021:21 After Bernie got shuffled out in 16 I'm not sure anyone cares believes that primaries matter either.
By kjkjadksj 2026-02-2017:42 You don’t have choice in the primary either. See what happened with the democrats and trying to stymie a sanders candidacy.
By asdfasvea 2026-02-212:11 You mean the primary where Biden ran virtually unopposed and then Harris got the nomination?
By roysting 2026-02-212:50 [dead]
By vee-kay 2026-02-2012:58 [dead]
By satvikpendem 2026-02-2121:56 > not because people are per se less interested in local politics than national politics
Actually I believe this is exactly the issue. Most people are interested more in national politics than county or even state politics. Of the people I know who vote in national elections, very few vote in local ones or even go to city council meetings.
By munificent 2026-02-202:322 reply > Rich people buy out newspapers to signal-boost their own preferred messages to the public.
Right, but micro level difference matters here. If a middle-class person can help an important story reach an audience, that's helpful for democracy. When a billionaire buys a newspaper, it isn't.
This is also why I think suggesting it work like a kickstarter where multiple people can pool money to unlock an article would be helpful. It naturally collects the will of many people in a democratic way.
This is basically political fundraising, where rich people signal-boost their preferred candidate and help them attract lots of donors from the public.
I think the fundamental piece you're missing is the Pareto principle. In any popularity contest, the most attention accrues to the most popular. This naturally leads to a power law distribution in popularity.
By judahmeek 2026-02-203:51 I'm actually wondering if Citizens United will prove to be a stabilizing force.
https://www.cnn.com/2026/02/18/politics/texas-senate-primary... shows that, in this year's Texas race, the centrists are getting more funding than the culture warriors even though the culture warriors are more popular.
Granted, that's only a single data point.
By kelseyfrog 2026-02-2023:34 It sounds quite aligned with how assurance contracts[1] work.
The solution to increasing interest in local government is to strengthen the federal system (repealing the 17th amendment) & even extending it into state government (state senators should be appointed by, say, the city councils of the 24 largest municipalities in said state).
This decentralization of power would bring the peoples' focus back to their own neighborhoods, where they can actually hold government officials accountable.
By freeone3000 2026-02-204:07 That’s a recipe for corruption and minority rule. It centralizes, not decentralizes, power, in the hands of fewer people. I would advise looking to effectively any senatorial appointment from the gilded age to see why the 17th was needed: monetary exchanges for senatorial seats was widespread, race-based disenfranchisement was a reality, and in one state, Utah, a theocracy was nearly cemented. A greater focus on local rights, and greater federalist powers, should not preclude senatorial elections.
By TuringNYC 2026-02-2011:52 >> Maybe you could do something cumulative and Kickstarter-like where there's a threshold for the article to be unlocked and anyone can chip in to getting it over the line. This would take advantage of human psychology that we like being part of something bigger than ourselves.
This sort of happens with Substack, albiet not as explicitly. People become "Founding Sponsors" or "Paid Subscribers" and they effectively subsidize it for everyone else because they appreciate the author's work and want the author to succeed. Authors often want to give away the content since it is indeed better if everyone can read it (as you note) -- but often cannot sustain it without a minimum set of sponsors.
I think you are speaking about this happening at the article level rather than publication level, which seems pretty hard since the readership would be fractured and long-tailed.
By Folcon 2026-02-2010:41 You're basically describing the Random Model by Greg Stolze[0]
Basically someone creates a work and puts a price on it and then like with Kickstarter asks people to fund it, however after it's funded it becomes public and is released into the public domain
-[0]: unfortunately I can't find the original article, but this covers gist of it https://caffeineforge.com/2012/11/26/the-ransom-model/
By AceJohnny2 2026-02-201:281 reply FWIW, LWN.net has a form of this, where a subscriber can share a "guest" link for a subscriber-only article (All such articles become open a week later anyhow).
It's bad form to share guest links on aggregators like HN, I don't think LWN has a quota on the number of accesses on Guest links. On the other hand, the occasional widely-shared guest link may bring a few more subscribers, but I doubt this scales.
By setupminimal 2026-02-201:38 It's actually not bad form to share guest links on aggregators, for that reason — we're entirely subscriber-funded, and we get a lot of new subscribers coming in via subscriber links, which is why we keep offering them. It's always nice when one of my articles end up being shared widely.
Although we do tend to notice trends in what kinds of articles make it onto aggregators like HN and which ones don't; if you've enjoyed LWN's technical reporting, but you've been getting it all filtered through HN or lobste.rs, you might like to come look at the website directly and see some of the wider content mix that we work on.
By Twisell 2026-02-206:21 The system you describe is already implemented at least on this French independent media "Arrêt sur Images". Subscribers can vote to gift articles to the public.
(I'll link Wikipedia as a proxy to avoid HN hug of DDOS https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arr%C3%AAt_sur_images English version has not been updated so recently)
Sorry to be the wet blanket but what you're arguing for, advocacy, is by far the worst and most ineffective form of doing politics. Talking about things doesn't convince anyone. Talking to the small amounts of people that agree doesn't get the balling moving.
Want to know what does? Organizing. Getting people that disagree with you, to agree with you. That never happens through advocacy, you have to organize.
Organizing is often less about convincing people that are in hard opposition and more about moving ppl that are pro, soft or uninformed. Then moving those people to take actions that advance the ball in their own interests or the interest of allies. You can really only move people that are hard against when the stakes are low and they have no ideological commitment against what you are suggesting. Getting someone to change ideologically is a slow or impossible process that comes from changes in social position and inner changes.
This isn't true in my experience as a party operator at all. You can easily move MAGA to progressive quite simply, do some deep canvassing but you'll find out that there are more agreements that people care about (healthcare costs, housing costs, poor salaries, poor retirement, decaying society) where you can build on top of.
Also what you're saying goes against the most effective union advice from people like Jane McAlevey that have successfully implemented strikes with >95% participation rates and getting workers effectively everything they ask for. Want to know how she is able to achieve this? She talks to those that people respect and follow in the workplace, often these people are at odds against you.
In her books she has given example after example on how she would convert people that were leading the anti-union efforts into being pro-union joining the cause.
Sorry man, just because your organizational skills are terrible doesn't me that there aren't real effective ways to do this.
Those people weren't ideologically against you on housing, healthcare, or poor salaries etc. If they were, you wouldn't be able to convince them. The reason they were easier to move is because of their class position. If you talked to a business owner, they would be against improving many of those things, particularly poor salaries and retirement. Healthcare keeps employees tied to work too.
With workers, there isn't an economic interest against changing those positions. With a business owner there is. I'm sure you understand this since you are talking about unions. In the taxonomy I described, I would categorize the people you're talking to as "soft" or "uninformed" because you are encouraging them to take action in their own interest.
By shimman 2026-02-2019:21 Once again, I implore you to actually do some political organizing because you're just spouting nothing meaningful in general. Good luck.
By munificent 2026-02-202:342 reply Organizing still requires access to ground truth information. It's not enough for people to be organized. They do need to be organized around actual good ideas which requires information.
Organizing without journalism is just religious evangelism and mob justice.
No, this still doesn't matter. Just still waste of time of time caring about what journalists think over activating the local community into your cause.
Go read "No Shortcuts" by Jane McAlevey to understand what effective organizing is.
By munificent 2026-02-2018:141 reply I don't think you're hearing me.
You are presuming that one has a cause and that that cause is correct.
But where does that presumption come from? In order to be worth supporting, a cause does actually need to be based in reality. And you can't get that without journalism.
Should I join a cause that wants to outlaw popsicle sticks? Raise taxes on birdwatchers? Require owners of unicycles to register them? How does someone figure out what's a useful cause without actual information?
By shimman 2026-02-2019:23 There's no point in hearing you because you're still espousing ineffective things. You do you, I know what works because I've been doing it for 5 years. The people that taught me were doing it effectively for 40 years. It's not complicated or hard, you just have to you know... actually organize with the appropriate power players.
I can see why advocacy is appealing to you though because you aren't sacrificing anything and allows oneself to be lazy rather than effective.
By AnthonyMouse 2026-02-203:18 > I wonder if there is a viable business model where for each article, readers can pay to unlock it not just for themselves, but for everyone.
The thing that best approximates what you're asking for and is likely to work (i.e. doesn't need micropayments) is the "free to read" substacks. Anyone can read them, and anyone can pay to subscribe, and if enough people subscribe so that the authors can make rent, they keep writing.
The hardest part about either one is that it requires altruism and then people are often accosted by insufficiently schooled wannabe intellectuals who tell them that being altruistic is irrational. Meanwhile human beings would otherwise intuitively understand that once your basic needs are met, valuing the common good more than personal consumption of hedonistic luxury products is a perfectly rational thing to do, until someone comes along to lecture them on what they should want and try to make them feel stupid for wanting something better.
By estimator7292 2026-02-2018:421 reply Donate to your local library.
This is the entire point and purpose of the public library system: aggregating resources to provide accessible information and entertainment for local communities.
Your local library almost certainly has subscriptions to several online and physical news sources. Typically larger libraries have physical newspaper subscriptions from across the country.
If you want to improve accessibility for everyone while still keeping publishers paid, donate to your local library and tell everyone you know about the services they offer. Seriously, we already have a nationwide system to provide access to information that not everyone can afford. We don't need to invent something new and more complicated.
By 1123581321 2026-02-2019:15 It’s a nice sentiment (librarianship runs in my family) but there are still issues with accessibility for library institutional subscriptions, compared to easily shared links. Relying on institutional subscriptions for revenue isn’t enough for the publishers and journalists. It’s also hard to target donations towards certain parts of the collection; at most libraries almost none of your donation would go towards periodicals.
None of these problems are unsolvable, but typical libraries would need to significantly change their focus and invest in new shared technology first.
I do recommend contacting circulation, reference or technology direction to share your desire to see the library play a larger role in making journalism accessible to the community.
By raincole 2026-02-203:48 > I want the whole populace to be informed, even poor people.
> ...I wonder if there is a viable business model where for each article, readers can pay to unlock it not just for themselves, but for everyone.
Propagation is free; quality journalism is premium.
An interesting idea, nonetheless.
However, in the end, I really don't believe any serious article ever moved the needle of an election. The kind of news that actually make people vote is "(identity) of (skin color) killed (another identity) of (another skin color) brutally," not some analysis over the economical consequence of the cease of Fed independence.
By mitthrowaway2 2026-02-201:39 I really like this idea for a lot of reasons, but especially the last one. It seems like it creates an incentive model that's much closer to rewarding quality investigative journalism rather than the viral junk that ad-driven business models incentivize.
But there is room for it to go wrong, so it would have to be designed carefully. For example it's still vulnerable to the same rage-bait incentive that ad-driven services are, where people decide that articles that make them angry or afraid, or which make their ideological opponents look evil, are more worth spreading (and therefore more worthy of paying to unlock for the crowds).
There's probably no perfect defence against this, but there's at least one option where the kickstarter contract can be structured so that the payments get returned if the article is later found to be factually incorrect in some major aspect. Then at least there's a pull towards truth, even if it's still rage-inducing.
Of course, this model also incentivizes the writing of articles that groups with more buying power are more likely to want to spread, so the wealthier blocs will shape the narrative... but when has the world ever been otherwise.
By troyvit 2026-02-2014:02 What if you did like The Guardian, but writ small, and just suggest how much the article is worth after a person read it. Often when I read something really good I have a bit of a high at the end of it, real gratitude for the writer(s) and others who put it together. I wouldn't mind if that feeling was monetized.
By PaulRobinson 2026-02-219:50 I've thought about doing this with software:
"I will write X. Once I have sold $Y worth of licenses, I'll open source it".
Every purchaser is contributing towards the future state of it being open sourced. It balances the needs of developers to need to live and pay bills vs most us wanting to get our code out there. It breaks the monthly recurring revenue model most customers hate. It incentivises early adopters to "invest" by getting early access, but means uncertain just have to wait.
Doing this with articles, books, music, whatever - all sounds pretty cool to be honest. It requires creators to radically transform their human need to maximise revenue from "hits" though.
Wouldn't we just be reading what people like Musk would want us to read? Or content that makes either extreme of the political spectrum feel passionate? I fear it would drown out little truths and balanced opinions.
By munificent 2026-02-2014:30 > Wouldn't we just be reading what people like Musk would want us to read?
What do you think happens now?
Great point and good idea. Maybe something like the Kickstarter model, where you commit to paying something and it only gets deducted if enough people commit?
You'd probably still want to read it straight away rather than wait so you'd pay a small amount for immediate access and commit an additional amount for public access if the threshold is reached. The public commitment could come at the bottom of the article, once you've decided that it's on the public interest.
Counterpoint, you'v just changed publishing incentives. If I write 10 public interest stories, but notice a particular topic is making me more $$, I'll focus in on that.
You could end up with bad actors/PR management types promoting particular stories constantly or to detract from investigation they want less public.
By munificent 2026-02-2014:31 That incentive already exists completely in ad-driven media.
At least this way, readers have a way to vote beyond just what happens to consume their attention and get their eyeballs on ads.
By snthpy 2026-02-209:00 Thanks. I always like putting my ideas out there as I often get feedback on points I hadn't considered.
On this leading to reporting being pushed more towards what people consider in the public interest, I would argue that's a good thing. It's also maybe not that different to the current status quo if you look at how different TV or news networks cater to one target market or another.
With regards to your second point, sounds like you're essentially describing a Sybil attack. I agree with you that that's a serious concern. I'm just going to think aloud here so not sure where I'll end on this but let's see:
1. Having to make a micropayment for each upvote will at least put some cost to the bad actors, cf spam email vs spam SMS. That still makes it more amenable to abuse by the rich but I guess in the end it would come down to the balance of economic power and interest/participation between the masses and the elites?
2. How does it compare to the current model? You pay for a monthly subscription which in this context is an undifferentiated portfolio bundle of the news stories of a particular month. I guess that does make the cost of a Sybil attack higher because you can't just spend on the particular other stories trending at the same time as the one that you are currently trying to bury. For the good actor consumer this means that they generally have to pay for/support a news organisation that is broadly aligned with their interests or ideology. It does create this cliff effect though in that if I don't think I'll read enough stories in a particular month to justify my subscription then I won't pay for it at all.
3. I guess this mirrors the kind of debate and thought that's been going on in decentralized blockchain and web3 circles over the past decade or more about how to structure incentives that create broad distributions of power without too much concentration. I'm not up to speed on that so would love it if someone more knowledgeable would weigh in.
4. I had a thought about tying subscriptions to real world identities of natural persons but I don't like that from a privacy and censorship perspective.
5. I was reminded of Quadratic Voting (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadratic_voting) which I believe would work well if there is a limited set of participants but I think won't protect you from a Sybil attack when it is cheap to create identities.
6. Building on points 5 and 4, what about this? You need a decentralized digital identity in the form of a DID which would have to be signed by some trusted party, either a government or some other institution. This could still be anonymous or pseudononymous in that when you go to the authority to have it signed, the signing authority checks that you currently don't have another active identity or any previous ones have been revoked (potentially problematic as I'm guessing the authority would have to maintain a link and I don't know if that's possible in a zero knowledge way). Alternatively identities are unlimited but expensive to create, say something like $1000 a piece so that creating 1M fake ones at least costs you $1bn. It's yours for life though so you can amortize the cost over time. In order to not cut out people at the bottom of the income distribution, they can use the government signed one but they lose the benefit of anonimity.
7. Once you have something like 6 then maybe QV is a good mechanism for apportioning micropayments on stories in the public interest?
Anyway, would love to know what current SOTA on this is in web3 circles rather than my speculations over my morning coffee.
By friendzis 2026-02-2012:07 > This would take advantage of human psychology that we like being part of something bigger than ourselves. > And it would hopefully have the emergent property that news that people feel is actually valuable gets spread more widely than useless junk.
There are at least two additional emergent properties:
1. That would essentially put a ceiling on revenue per article.
2. Articles close to the unlock threshold would be much more likely to get funding, opening huge space for manipulation.
By ted_bunny 2026-02-201:11 What about crowdfunding bounties for information to be publicly released? We all have some big questions and I'd gladly pay into them if it worked.
By ishanmahapatra 2026-02-2017:26 There’s the “unlocking the commons”[0] model used by Tim Carmody and Craig Mod.
[0]: https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/01/unlocking-the-commons/
> Since everyone can vote, I want the whole populace to be informed, even poor people.
So then only rich people get to decide what they make available for free to poor people.
I don't think this is adding anything new to the way the world already works.
By DennisP 2026-02-2014:25 That's how it works now. This way regular people have some say instead of no say.
By juris 2026-02-202:29 that is an incredible idea and i would support you with code should you or anyone else decide to make that happen
By DennisP 2026-02-201:09 That seems like a really great idea.
By popalchemist 2026-02-202:19 That would incentivize locking important things behind paywalls.
By exe34 2026-02-207:47 Elon musk and Peter Thiel will just pay for all the conspiracy theories.
By jasonlotito 2026-02-2015:34 > Let's say a journalist writes an excellent article about something political of serious import. I'm fine with paying for that article to get access to it.
Ignoring the millionaire angle of just paying for salaries, we sort of already have that. It's the algorithm of whatever platform a person is on. The net result is people focusing on things that get the most eyeballs.
The problem with your vision is literally what you are saying:
> I'm fine with paying for that article
Sure. But what about the one before that? And the one after that? Articles that don't meet your standards that you would say you are fine paying for.
It's like asking to pay a programmer per line of code that goes into the actual final build.
Unit tests? Nope. Integration tests? Nada. Comments? Nope. Documentation? Are users paying for it? No? No way!
This sounds ridiculous because it is.
And you already work this way. You lump stuff people don't care about with stuff people do care about and combine them.
It's the old joke about paying by the hour vs. by the project, and how you aren't paying for the 15 minutes of work it takes an expert to do something, but for the 20 years of experience that allow them to do it in 15 minutes.
> I wonder if there is a viable business model where for each article, readers can pay to unlock it not just for themselves, but for everyone. The price would obviously have to be higher since you aren't just buying it for yourself. But perhaps the sense of "I'm helping build a better-informed world and helping broadcast my values" would encourage people to pay that higher price.
I think that could work in a way. I think it's a bit more involved than just buying an article.
Back of the comment thinking here: you see an article you like, you buy a year subscription. This signals that sometimes articles take longer to write, that the person writing that article can't write good articles if they are stressed, and that they avoid having to only ever chase trends.
Then, by having that sub, you have votes. These are effectively "tipping" with your subscription. You don't pay more; you just signal that you want this article to be free. If enough people "tip" on this article, it goes free.
Does this work? I don't know. I feel like in this case, it's low enough to be feasible but not too low as to diminish the work. I think people who claim they are willing to pay for the article will show their true colors and balk at the price. Ignoring that the article is more than just the lines of text and the time it took to type it out.
There is a lot of hate for the idea of micropayments here, so I'd like to offer a counterpoint. I use a service that provides access to a bunch of different LLMs. Each time I call an LLM I, in effect, pay a $0.001 - $0.05 for the response. (Technically, this is implemented as me having to renew earlier.) Each time I make a call, I don't know if the answer will be useful. I don't even know how much it will cost! And in practice, the answers are often garbage, and I have to pay anyway. I find this annoying, but--to my surprise--only very mildly annoying. This has made me much more open-minded about micropayments for news / articles.
By contravariant 2026-02-1921:587 reply There's a particular part in the discussion that rubs me the wrong way (which is more about micropayments as alternative to ads, rather than micropayments themselves)
It tends to go something like, if not micropayments then ads, if not ads then subscriptions. And people dislike subscriptions more than ads, and ads more than micropayments so the conclusion is micropayments.
But I don't like the way ads are presented as inevitable. Usually in some alarmist fashion listing all the stuff that would work should this revenue cease.
Ads are a way for the incumbent to seek rent, the eventual return on investment after destroying all alternatives.
So don't complain to me what will happen when I decline to download ads over _my_ network, send tracking from _my_ devices, show them on _my_ screens. When people start listing the giants that will topple the only word that crosses my mind is
Good.
The irritating thing to me here is that I actually don't mind the concept of advertising. Mostly it's the implementation. Newspaper ads don't bug me one bit, because they're not physically capable of moving, animating, dancing, and trying to get my attention. They're not physically capable of tracking my habits and reporting them back to the mothership. They're just... there. Passive. Occasionally interesting, or at least pleasantly designed.
If internet advertising was more like newspaper advertising, I wouldn't feel quite so compelled to go out of my way to block it. But no, someone somewhere along the way decided it had to be actively distracting, and track those impressions, and the industry just can't help itself. It's rotten to the core.
By wolvoleo 2026-02-1923:20 They didn't bug me in the 90s but 3 decades of deeply annoying internet ads have kinda made me allergic to them.
I don't think I'll ever stop using an adblocker. Even if ads would become less annoying or if it would become illegal to use an adblocker or something.
100% agree!
The other day I was thinking how pleasant it was to read a newspaper (26 years ago) compared to reading the news online today.
With a newspaper, the paragraph you are currently reading doesn't suddenly jump out of view just because some ad finally loaded or was replaced by a different sized ad. The ads were static and so inoffensive back then, but they still made the newspapers lots of money.
There are downsides to newspapers, of course: they are unwieldy on the train, they kill trees, and they get out-of-date really fast.
If some decent publication could replicate the good parts of a newspaper for a modern tablet device ($0.50 or whatever per issue, the ads are static images and never replaced after the page is loaded, and no jumping content), I think I would pay.
By nicoburns 2026-02-201:03 It's more expensive than you suggest you are looking for, but the financial times does this pretty well.
Magazines on the other hand could get annoying, especially with the scratch-n-sniff perfume/cologne ads.
Otherwise, I agree with the bad thing about ads is adTech and not ads themselves. The internet just allowed our worst selves to run rampant with the obvious result coming to fruition.
By jstrong 2026-02-205:37 I don't know, man, glossy magazine ads were glamorous. sure there was stupid stuff, but the comparison between the "one weird trick" era and magazine ads of someone looking cool so you have a positive impression with some brand name is pretty stark.
By HoldOnAMinute 2026-02-200:14 Anyone who visited a Wendy's in the 1980s or 1990s knows that newspaper ads can also make for interesting tabletop decorations
By SllX 2026-02-1923:07 You gotta punch the monkey though! Isn’t that fun?!
But no, that is how we got here. Internet ads were novel until they were just irritating.
But do you think the concept of advertising is the best solution to the problem it tries to solve? I have serious doubts.
Sure, 100 years ago you had no other way to make something known, but today with everybody having a smartphone there might be other ways. I always would like to see reviews of stuff from my immediate network of friends (or, let's say 2-3 connections) - wouldn't that be much better? Of course, the whole ad industry will have zero interest to promote something like this, where they loose control and the process might be actually efficient.
By zeta0134 2026-02-200:15 Sorta depends on how you define the concept. A sign on the side of a storefront is definitely marketing. If I walk into a department store, every product on the shelf is wrapped in advertising, from its packaging to the brand name to the picture of what the product is for. When I visit Amazon, and start searching for something to buy, every single thing that comes up could be thought of as an ad for itself, since otherwise I wouldn't be able to find it in the first place.
These are contextually relevant ads. Of course they are, right? The task is buying stuff. That's the time, and the place. The best time, really. My wallet is out and I'm ready to go with the purchase.
If it's a little hard for me to discover that a product exists, so that I know to seek it out, I think that's okay. We could do with more curation and less firehose-of-attention in that department. Needing to coordinate those sponsorships ahead of time should act as a stronger filter. The newspaper knowing which ad it is running alongside today's article might not have been such a bad idea. The ones that cheapen out and print nonsense damage their reputation in the process, right?
Why would ads go away just because you pay? Print newspapers and magazines have had ads forever and they cost money. Even expensive glossy magazines like National Geographic have full page ads, half page ads, etc.
There is no natural law that ads will go away. Ads will only disappear if their presence would make the company lose more customers than they gain on ads. Ads make them money. If people don't mind it so much to abandon the service/website, there will be ads. Publications are businesses and want to maximize profits. They don't just want to cover some fixed ongoing costs, like hosting and journalist salaries. As a business they use the available tools to make more profits. There is no "enough" in business.
Exactly, we see this play out clearly with streaming apps. Disney sells a subscription to remove ads, then one day they change their mind and now you only see “less ads” and they introduce an even more expensive plan that removes ads. The behavior should be criminal yet every major streaming app does this.
These companies like to pretend ads are the pro-consumer approach when in reality they’d much rather scale through advertising than anything else. They get to increase revenue without touching acquisition cost. The only loser is the poor chump trying to watch their favorite TV show.
Prime is worse.
Pay for the service. Then pay more to remove ads. But then a massive amount of their catalog remains “only with ads.” And then they pack half the usable screen with media that must be bought and titles that require add-on subscriptions.
It’s a real cesspool.
Hulu does a lot of this garbage too, but not quite as obnoxiously.
By jstrong 2026-02-205:42 I feel like the less tolerance I have for ads (as time goes on), the more desperate they get in trying increasingly aggressive ways of making you watch ads. I'm never watching ads again, ever! I'm willing to pay, but not with my time for your terrible, horrendous, bullshit ads!
By hn_acc1 2026-02-1923:35 True, but also, businesses have used "coupons" for a long time. I saw one article where this was described as "selling the same product at multiple tiers".
eg. if you're rich, you don't bother with coupons (in general) - your time is more valuable than clipping the coupon and remembering to take it. if you're middle class, you use the coupon to feel like you're getting a deal, but if you forget, oh well. if you're lower class, you wait for a sale and then use the coupon to be able to afford it at all.
Similar with ads - if you won't let me access your site without showing me ads (even with an adblocker) - I really don't need your product that badly. Sell to those who have a lot of spare attention or willpower to look past your ads.
I don't mean I click on ads - EVER - but they're distracting. VERY distracting. I mean, the few times I've had to use yahoo mail from a browser without an ad blocker, it was an unbelievably bad experience. (yes, I still use yahoo. I got at least one of those accounts right around the time "BackRub" was renamed "Google")
By michaelt 2026-02-1923:28 When people are trying to justify ads, they often lean on "our servers cost $X per month and we have Y journalists paid $Z per month, therefore we need revenue from ads" which makes it sound like they need to raise a fixed, finite amount.
That sounds much more persuasive than "our billionaire owner paid a lot of money for this for-profit business, and he'd really like a return on his investment"
But you're right, of course - the fact someone pays a lot of money for something doesn't mean it won't be plastered with tawdry ads.
By kelvinjps10 2026-02-1922:29 I don't mind sponsored ads that are mostly static inside the video or text. Also if creators accept sponsors that are too bad their reputation might be affected.
The only thing that can be in some cases it's influencing the content and the creator not providing genuine content because conflict of interest
By atoav 2026-02-208:32 A particular aspect of the discussion is also: What makes you trust that once micropayments are around ads will stop? Look at other services, like Netflix for example. They will happily have you pay and show you ads if they feel they can get away with it.
I am not at all against paying for journalism (I already do in many ways), but IMO, it would be best if there was a way to pay money to one place and then have it go to all journalistic media that deserves that name and has a track record of not being factually wrong multiple times per day.
Thinking about how journalism ought to be payed in this day and age also means to think about what kind of journalism we want to incentivise and which one we want to disincentivise. What we need is the kind that is factually correct and a check to the most wealthy and powerful people, organisations, companies and countries on earth. What we don't need is the kind that is captured by exactly those people, the kind that bends reality to stoke the lowest impulses etc.
With this in mind, we should think about how to design a incentive structure that makes that result benefitial, while all others are unsupported.
I don't think most people mind ads. Throw up an animated gif or a jpg banner that you serve from your domain. Nobody is blocking that.
What people dislike are mountains of javascript that track everything you do across broad swathes of the internet and then sell that to businesses and governments that are effectively engaging in mass psychological experiments on us.
By TheGRS 2026-02-1922:21 Well, people legitimately hated banner ads and pop-ups. When I get linked to some small news publisher I'm often reading the article between these giant ads, sometimes I don't realize there's actually more content to an article because the ads take up so much space! I typically close those sites out and try to find what I'm looking for elsewhere.
By mrighele 2026-02-1922:32 I think that most people don't really care about tracking, but the fact that often ads make their experience miserable.
You open a link, you get a full screen ad, and have to wait 10 seconds or more. When you finally can close the ad, a popup appears asking if you want to subscribe to their newsletter. you close that too. A cookie banner reminds you that they care about your privacy, that's why they share your details with 1000+ partners. When you find the hidden button to say that you don't accept finally the article appears, but the bottom half is occupied by an overlay with a video ad. All the while the page scrolls terribly because of the amount of javascript loaded.
Or, sometimes, you get ad, cookie banner and then they tell you that you have to pay to access the content.
I suspect that if people had to choose between ads without tracking and tracking without the ads, they would choose the latter.
By giantrobot 2026-02-1922:211 reply This is exactly my problem with ads. They've turned into a spying mechanism that eats my battery, bandwidth, and privacy. Not only do the ad platforms want to track me but then sell their data to an innumerate number of "partners". I have no control or influence over how any of the data is used. I also have no meaningful way to opt out.
Clicking a link on the web is not tacit permission to endlessly surveil me. Viewing a blog post is not informed consent to be tracked. Even a cookie banner isn't informed consent.
While I never enjoyed magazine or television ads I never minded them. Some were even useful and introduced me to a product I ended up wanting/needing. They also didn't track me all over the web. I don't mind ads, I do mind surveillance.
By enaaem 2026-02-209:19 When I had my first smartphone I had dataplan for 500mb per month and that was enough to read news sites. That’s impossible now.
By 1bpp 2026-02-202:54 For a few years in the webcomic & blog space there was Ryan North's Project Wonderful, which served unintrusive auctioned banner ads that were usually advertising another creator's genuinely interesting work; I have no problem at all seeing ads for things sincerely made by humans.
Mozilla tried this. But the only people who want this is consumers. Advertisers want as much info as possible to target ads so would never choose this option unless heavily pressured by consumers.
By davidfischer 2026-02-1922:56 Founder of EthicalAds here. In my view, this is only partially true and publishers (sites that show ads) have choices here but their power is dispersed. Advertisers will run advertising as long as it works and they will pay an amount commensurate with how well it works. If a publisher chooses to run ads without tracking, whether that's a network like ours or just buyout-the-site-this-month sponsorships, they have options as long as their audience generates value for advertisers.
That said, we 100% don't land some advertisers when they learn they can't run 3rd party tracking or even 3rd party verification.
By calebkaiser 2026-02-1922:38 There is a platform called ethical ads for developer focused advertising: https://www.ethicalads.io/
does Google AdWords still exist? text only ads solves a lot of these issues
My favorite forum has ads on every page. One header and one footer. Text only as a link to the site or product being advertised. The advertisers pay the site owner himself.
I've bought things from those ads because they're targeting the demographic on that site, not targeting me specifically. They're actually more relevant.
Now that's not probably sustainable, but I have to imagine that the roi for the advertisers is higher than general targeted ads. I've never even clicked on one of those except by accident.
I don't understand why more companies don't do contextual ads, yeah. Why track users all around the web when you can go to a website about cars and put in car ads, or a website about music and sell concert tickets or etc? You already know everyone on that website is interested in the topic, and the analytics would be much cheaper this way.
By davidfischer 2026-02-1923:29 They absolutely do. Every sponsorship you see on a podcast or a youtube video or a streamer is a contextual ad. Many open source sponsorships are actually a form of marketing. You could argue that search ads are pretty contextual although there's more at work there. Every ad in a physical magazine is a contextual ad. Physical billboards take into account a lot of geographical context: the ads you see driving in LA are very different than the ones you see in the Bay Area. Ads on platforms like Amazon, HomeDepot, etc. are highly contextual and based on search terms.
By tcfhgj 2026-02-1923:25 Oxymoron
By akoboldfrying 2026-02-1923:341 reply Not only news giants need revenue. Everyone producing news needs it, including any hoped-for smaller, more democratised new entrants to the industry.
Where will that revenue come from?
Should we expect high-quality journalism for free?
By contravariant 2026-02-1923:511 reply Should people expect high quality journalism if revenue is based on the number of views?
Good journalism costs money, people should expect to pay.
Though I'd point out that publishing news is now cheaper than ever, and people were more than willing to pay for access before, so why shouldn't they be willing to pay less now?
Or perhaps more to the point, why are they _not_ willing to pay now? And is the reason something ad-based perhaps?
By akoboldfrying 2026-02-200:191 reply I interpreted your original post to mean that you found none of micropayments, ads or subscriptions to be acceptable. Now I have the impression that I misinterpreted you -- but I still can't tell what kind(s) of payment you would actually find acceptable.
What kind(s) of payment would you find acceptable?
By contravariant 2026-02-2010:591 reply My preference would be free, single payment, subscription. Probably in that order.
I don't mind micropayments as a _method_ to achieve any of those, but I don't like them as a replacement for ads. And I don't accept the premise that ads should be replaced with something similar.
By akoboldfrying 2026-02-212:07 Thanks. By "single payment", do you mean one payment for lifetime access? I'm aware of a personal cloud storage provider that offers this, but I don't think it could work for news.
By charcircuit 2026-02-201:09 Those are not mutually exclusive. You can have a site that requires a subscription, includes ads, and requires a micropayment for each article read.
Newspapers were already bundled that way: you got national news, local news, business news, sports, the funny pages, classifieds, wire stories from AP & Reuters, etc.
Then they went onto the web and were forced to prioritize, but where the entire bundling idea falls apart is you’re suggesting that we bundle the bundles.
Here’s the harsh reality: most news is already priced appropriately for the value that it delivers to most people, and for most people, most news is worth $0.00.
I pay for the news I want to read already, both websites and podcasts, and I pay directly for it. But no matter how many New York Times or USA Today or other random news links my friends send me, or whatever else I run into on the open web when I’m checking someone’s sources, I will never pay greater than $0.00 for it. Not $0.99, $0.01, not $0.001, not even $0.0001. If I have to engage in a financial transaction just for clicking a link, then I’m not clicking the link and I’ll start demanding that citations to be delivered to me in a form I can read instead, and probably stop providing links in turn. Other people will do the same.
And for those rare publications that people both want to read and also are willing to pay for en masse? Stuff like the Wall Street Journal? They’re never going to devalue themselves by getting in the bundle. Even with Apple News which famously has a partnership with the WSJ specifically, they withhold their most valuable stories, the stuff that people buy the Wall Street Journal for because they’re the value drivers in any potential partnership. Almost every other publication that would stand to benefit would in effect be free-riding off the WSJ’s largesse.
> then I’m not clicking the link and I’ll start demanding that citations to be delivered to me in a form I can read instead, and probably stop providing links in turn.
I’m going to go out on a feedback shaped limb and say that demanding things like this from friends isn’t an appealing trait. If they are suggesting it to you, that’s not enough to justify 1/100th of a cent?
Brother.
Read what they send you or don’t, and by all means communicate your preferences, but saying that you’re not going to share with others in retaliation is… I mean it’s definitely a vibe!
Demanding your friends engage in a financial transaction with a third party is a different vibe. The reality of what would actually happen is this: if I can’t read it, I can’t read it. If I ask and they’re willing to provide it, then I’ll read it, and I would do the same with them.
But the truth is, that would grate on people, and not just with me and mine, but for everyone if we all had to engage in financial transactions to read the links that are shared with us or posted on the web. So people would just stop sharing links. I’d think twice before sending someone a link, and others would as well. We’d probably just swap to copying the whole article in another form and sharing that instead, but the extra steps would reduce the amount we would be willing to share over time cuz trading PDFs we have to generate ourselves is not as much fun as trading links.
By kelvinjps10 2026-02-1922:321 reply There is some publications that manage this by letting paying person to share it and the other person can see it too
By SllX 2026-02-1922:36 I subscribe to a couple of these already. :) It’s not micro-transactions though, it’s a feature built off a subscriber-provider relationship.
By SauntSolaire 2026-02-200:13 What if the sender covered the micro transaction on the behalf of the receiver? People might be more inclined to send what they see as micro-gifts, rather than micro-obligations.
By Paracompact 2026-02-1922:372 reply Are you assuming the current landscape where engaging in a financial transaction, even if only for $0.01, is a tedious and unquantifiably dangerous gambit? (Sale of your info, leaking of your info, dark pattern subscription TOS's, etc.)
Or would you still hold your opinions even in a theoretical landscape where paying $0.01 is just consenting to that amount being deducted from your bank account, with no friction or danger?
If I could EASILY click "yes" to say, pay $0.01 from a pre-filled anonymous wallet that I have to manually refill (say, in $10 increments) and there's no way to hack payment information in any way, OR to figure out what info I've paid for, that would help a LOT.
Of course, they would probably have to accept visa gift cards paid for in cash for this to actually be truly anonymous. I mean sure, I have nothing nefarious to hide - but who is to say what the current administration will decide is nefarious tomorrow? Reading too many NY Times articles, and not enough National Review articles? "You are in violation of the internet news fairness doctrine"...
By Paracompact 2026-02-201:031 reply Indeed this is what I was getting at. I think you're far from the only one whose market behavior would change given such technology.
This is somewhat ironic to me, given that I normally despise everything about fintech. But this seems like a product/practice that could actually change the world for the better. The closest we have is crypto wallets and that's far from perfect.
My stance is exactly what I said: most news is priced correctly for most people at $0.00.
If they value it at more than that, they will pay for it.
By Paracompact 2026-02-1923:061 reply Then I don't understand the bitter line in the sand you've drawn between $0.00 and $0.0001. You could spend a whole lifetime paying this latter amount multiple times per day, and it would cost you about as much as a box of bandaids.
If you really value the information contained in these articles at $0.00, then neither would you spend that much more valuable resource—time—in order to digest it, even if it were given to you for free.
So I don't think you're hung up about the actual financial cost in this analysis. You're either like most people, who simply don't want to deal with the rigmarole of patiently providing payment info to a hundred different vendors who will act irresponsibly with your data, or you have some purely symbolic and emotional connection to the notion that you're providing exactly zero dollars and zero cents to your enemies.
The vast majority of the time that I read the news, it’s from a publication I pay for. They get far far more than a box of bandaids over a lifetime.
The rest can be worth my time, sometimes, under limited circumstances, but usually it isn’t. Like who here can say that all of the links they’ve clicked on throughout their lifetime have been valuable, and haven’t just been time wasters?
If you put a financial cost on links though, people just won’t pay. And they won’t click links. We might waste less time too, but just because something got my time doesn’t mean I’m going to also give it money for having had the privilege of my time.
By Paracompact 2026-02-1923:511 reply > Like who here can say that all of the links they’ve clicked on throughout their lifetime have been valuable, and haven’t just been time wasters?
Certainly many of them are time wasters! But before you've clicked on these links, I should think they are best modeled as a random variable payout (P) as measured against the monetary (M) and temporal (T) cost of clicking and reading through them. If the expected value calculation doesn't work out (E(P) < E(M) + E(T)), this is when I say nope and don't click. If it does work out, then it works out in such a way that there is at least some very small micropayment value ε > 0 that I would (in a ideal and frictionless environment) also be willing to endure on top of the temporal cost.
What most "free" content providers decided to converge on in order to extract epsilons from consumers so that they can continue to do business is ads, rather than honest micropayments.
I would be fine with most businesses that rely on ad revenue burning to the ground. And there are a few businesses that I will go far out of my way to patronize with more-than-a-box-of-bandaids. But for the majority of the free content providers that are not steaming garbage, but are also not in the privileged group of content providers that I deeply approve of and consciously think about, then in a frictionless environment I think I would prefer that they survive off rationally priced micropayments rather than be forced into the ad circus.
By SllX 2026-02-202:05 > rationally priced micropayments rather than be forced into the ad circus
And when the rational price is zero, or rounds down to zero, they won’t survive either way, even with the magic fintech of your fantasies.
If something is worth paying for, then pay for it. People don’t want to pay because the real value of most news to them is actually just $0.00. Making the fraction of a penny small enough while somehow dodging all the middlemen that want their cut might get a few charitable folks on board, but it won’t replace ads, subscriptions, or anything else a news org can do to sustain its business model. It’s not about how small and frictionless you can make the cost to potentially charitable individuals, it’s about convincing them that it is worth doing at all when they already either pay nothing because it’s worth nothing to them or pay a lot because it’s worth a lot to them. The middle ground is where ads and free newsletters live.
By BikiniPrince 2026-02-1923:00 I price most news sites at negative value.
By carlosjobim 2026-02-1922:002 reply Okay, but why would newspapers looking for revenue sources concern themselves with the opinions of somebody who would never pay them no matter what circumstances? You're not a potential customer, so a non-entity in their concerns.
By SllX 2026-02-1922:12 > You're not a potential customer, so a non-entity in their concerns.
A small correction: I am a potential customer, at least in the general sense. I am someone that subscribes to news publications as I already pointed out. Who I pay in any given month is not set in stone, and the news market is still somehow strangely dynamic with new options replacing old ones all the time.
But if I’m paying, then it’s a subscriber-provider relationship; not a virtual bazaar transaction made by clicking a link.
He is because they make money from ads.
I wouldn't pay .000001 cents either. If they did charge this way the amount of generated clickbait titles would surpass anything we've seen before. At least now they have to backup the clickbait title with content that causes you to stay longer for more ads with micropayments they already took your money.
By SauntSolaire 2026-02-200:18 New micro payment scheme that charges .000001 cents every time you page down. Like the old listicles that make you click into a new page for every number, but instead you have your credit card tied to your scroll wheel.
By J_Shelby_J 2026-02-1922:102 reply There are articles that have changed my outlook and life so much that months, years, decades later I would value them in the thousands.
By landl0rd 2026-02-1922:33 They didn't change most people's life, though, and/or most people's lives were changed by other articles. Publishers cannot meaningfully price-discriminate on this basis. The closest version is republishing a longer version as a book.
So, consumers are left with some amount of surplus. The horror.
Did you go on to write checks in the thousands to the writers or publications that produced them?
By oblio 2026-02-1922:33 Worse than that, what was the percentage of these amazing articles?
Completely disagree that news is already priced appropriately for the value it delivers to people. I dont pay for the news I read because its not valued at $10 a month for me but I still do value it. For me $2 a month is what i value it but since they dont offer that as an option I cant pay. If you're to broke to click on a link because it might cost 0.0001 cent just say so. Maybe your friends can give you a cent so you can read news for the rest of your days.
By SllX 2026-02-1922:29 $2/month or $10/momth is apparently not the actual price then if you’re able to get it for $0/month.
By ipaddr 2026-02-1922:25 Most people are not paying per call or paying anything. If the goal is to reduce half a million readers to a core group of thousands who will pay then this idea might work.
There isn't so much hate, as it's fundamentally DoA based on the financial system architecture of the United States, which creates strict liability, and a licensing requirement for digital money transmission. You do not get to opt out of that responsibility. Micropayments are therefore a pipedream that undermines all progress at making any type of AML or KYC possible, which then in turn makes fighting any type of financial crime nigh-impossible.
The entire thing is held together through third party legal fictions that do the law enforcement as a pre-req of doing business. The government, and by extension the populace, would have to accept the intractibility of chasing down criminal financial networks were any sort of micropayment framework ever able to exist outside the regulatory regime.
It's a perennial dream of the up and coming technologist, who has not been exposed to enough humanity to understand we can't have nice things. Sorry to be yet another buster of bubbles. I was you-adjacent once. Then I actually worked at a money transmitting firm. Boy, did that come with some reality checks.
Please help me understand better, because it feels like part of the problem has already been solved. Specifically, I've been told that the independent journalists that I watch on YouTube Premium receive a portion of my subscription fee. Is that not a form of micropayments? The system seems to work well enough for videos. Isn't there some way to adapt that kind of system to other media?
By yunohn 2026-02-1922:19 The solution is called centralization by a middle man that takes a massive cut - eg YouTube Premium. Only Google makes real money off that, and the content creators rely on sponsors instead for their own revenue. So does it really work? I would despise a future where we solve micro transactions by giving up control to yet-another unnecessary body. Especially not even at the level of Visa or Mastercard, despite how much I dislike crypto.
No, that is absolutely 100% not micropayments, as the consumer is not paying per view/article/video whatever. They're paying a fixed fee and are not metered.
By hathawsh 2026-02-219:36 Good to know. Now I think I know why micropayments for news media never took off: because people who want to read news media probably don't want to waste mental cycles on keeping track of a micropayments account. They want a set-and-forget solution with a predictable cost. If micropayments can't fit those expectations, then the market probably wants something other than the thing we're calling micropayments.
Goes like the following: Google/YouTube have a userbase to track accounts for; they go to a bank (licensed money transmitter, with OFAC/KYC/AML programs implemented). Google gets paid by people looking to advertise, and that money goes into Google's master account. Google's finance system translates views/impressions to money movements to creator accounts hosted at other banks (same deal, OFAC/KYC/AML program in place). The main thing is, every party that actually moves around money, operates in such a way that the entire transaction chain is followable. It's not point to point, it's hub and spoke. The hubs keep track of everything to keep the Osama Bin Laden's or Russian Oligarch's, or Cuban nationals out of the U.S. financial system.
"Micropayments" have always been something different. We technologists just figured there would be a way we could whip up some accounting software, or a spec, and allow people a way to store and transact without relying on a custodial holder, with all the extra regulation burden. Point is though, government and law enforcement don't want that, because with that, it becomes a great deal more difficult to follow the money, or to get away with things like mandating everyone report money movements over some amount to the tax authority; something easy to do when it's tacked on to the condition of maintaining your license to do business. Every money transmitter being well behaved and integrated with the state maximizes the risk for anyone attempting to utilize the financial system for illegal activity.
Ergo... What you think of as already solved isn't "micropayments". It's traditional finance in the U.S. What we refer to when we say Micropayments, is a way to store value, maintain accounts, and run point to point transactions "blessed" or recognized by the world et al without an intermediary.
> The hubs keep track of everything to keep the Osama Bin Laden's or Russian Oligarch's, or Cuban nationals out of the U.S. financial system.
Yeah I don't think that worked:
https://marker.medium.com/how-russian-oligarchs-stow-away-th...
By salawat 2026-02-2019:43 Nope! That's the fun part! All the misery from the downsides, none of the upside! But imagine how much worse it could be! /s
There's a reason I'm doing anything possible to avoid going back into finance. I never developed the knack to just sit back quietly doing stupid things that don't work for the purpose everyone says it's for.
Decentralized or direct P2P micropayments are unlikely to work, true. But why are there so few attempts at centralized micropayments providers? The only success stories I see in the space are GitHub Sponsors and LiberaPay, where their entire thing is aggregating payments together (so you have 1 big card transaction a month per user, not 20 small ones) and doing KYC procedures with donation receivers (once GitHub, or rather Stripe, says you are legit, you can take money from any GitHub user).
By salawat 2026-02-200:54 That's called starting a bank, or financial services company, and lots of places do it, but the bar to do so, and remain able to do so is fairly high. The margins, however, are exquisite. The middlemen eat fat off the percent they skim off the top.
Everything you say makes sense. But can you help me understand why this doesn't also apply to the LLM service I use today? Doesn't that service, in effect, makes a "micropayment" to the LLM providers every time I make a query? Is the key difference that there are only a small-ish number of LLM providers? (Not doubting, just interested!)
As mentioned above, it's not a micropayment. It's just a payment. You can transact in whatever amounts you want, and backend systems will bump the numbers around just fine, even for fractions of a cent. Hell, that's how interest and currency exchange settle out. The LLM provider runs a meter. The meter tallies your activity, wraps it in a transaction, hands it to the backend, backend talks to other banks/payment gateways, an ACH happens, done. That isn't a "micropayment". That's just a payment. In fact, if you pay attention, some of the biggest winners in tech, namely cloud providers or AI providers, are as darling as they are because they figured out how to turn everyday compute tasks into billable transactions. We're exceptionally good at tracking the build up of value, even if your atomic unit of transaction is a thousandth of a cent, but x however many million customers you have, it quickly adds up.
Micropayments have always, as long as I've been in the industry, implied a level of disintermediation on the behalf of sender/receiver. The chance to have that kind of utility died September 11th, 2001, when the U.S. and western world suddenly got the bright idea that the only way to protect themselves from terrorists was to modify the system to be able to surveil everybody l, all at once. Bringing us to a codger explaining why P2P micropayments are pretty much a pipedream in the finance world as she is legally practiced.
Not too interested in debating the semantics of "micropayment", but it sounds like if we swap in "news sites" in place of "LLM providers" everything should still still be possible? Consumers could pay tiny amounts of money for individual articles?
By salawat 2026-02-2019:58 You already can with traditional finance. The only thing stopping that from being the case is that the news orgs don't want to sell their product that way, and you can't force them to. That's kind of a them thing. They get to dictate their terms, you don't like them, that's fine. Their answer would be you aren't their target demographic. Besides which, do you really want to create an arrangement by which someone sneaking in an XSS driven script will drive your browser to visit their entire catalog, and piping the content to /dev/null or similar, you getting charged for every GET?
The technical possibility is there. The desire to operate the business that way is not. You're a victim of the conspicuously absent feature implementation, and all I can say is... Well... Welcome to the club. Here's your "Fuck MBAs" hat, and an Occupy Wall Street T-Shirt, because the perpetrators inflicting your suffering all pretty much as a whole wear suits.
Would love to hear about some of those reality checks. Note: I'm not currently in favor of micropayments, but am willing to listen.
Well, there's OFAC, for one. In the U.S. alphabet soup, that's the Office of Foreign Asset Control, and they maintain the master sanctions list operated by the Federal government. This is a list, that as a matter of law, must be checked against every transaction. If there is a match on the receiving end of funds to a sanctioned individual, the transaction is immediately halted. If a sanctioned party is the originator, a flag may be raised for the institution to deal with otherwise. You do not want to end up on that list, because if you do, the U.S. financial system turns into a roach motel. Assets flow into the custodianship of the service provider, but are unable to move out. A very highly controversial feature to have implemented if I dare say so myself. Then there are the SAR's and CTR's, which are reports that must be filed by banks in the event of "suspicious activity". I.e. structuring, withdrawal of large amounts of cash, etc. They are specifically prohibited from informing you as a customer about these processes.
Then there's the risk department integration. It is mandatory to hand over transaction information on request by law enforcement. The process is mandatory, and continued licensure is conditional on maintaining a program through which financial surveillance can be conducted by the State.
Now, are these features inherently bad? No. Not at first blush. Do they have the potential to become horrifying? Well... Look at what happened to the ICC judge who got added to the sanctioned entities list. It doesn't just effect bank accounts. It involves anything that you engage in a digital transaction to maintain access to. That means entire sectors suddenly go from situation normal, to persona non grata, your business is not welcome here, at threat of massive fines for doing business with a sanctioned entity.
I went into finance looking for a boring, uncontroversial line of work, and came out after a few years realizing the entire sector is so damn wired for power projection it's not even funny. Once you see it and understand how the bounds of what you can do are constrained by these people who are authorized to digitally transact on your behalf... Well... It can't really be unseen.
Thanks. As someone who has lived in 3 countries (2 as an adult) and is considering leaving the US again.. Any hints on how NOT to end up on that list? I.e. avoid large transfers? What's the best way to transfer some $$ out of the US? I have no red flags in my background other than some speeding tickets 10+ years ago and have dual citizenship.
How far does this extend? I read the ICC judge had her credit cards canceled - which would be bad, but, has she been prevented from just going to her bank / withdrawing funds / writing a cheque to pay for her bills? Which western countries are more / less integrated into this?
By salawat 2026-02-2020:52 Don't want to end up on the Sanctioned Entity List? Avoid anything that might make you controversial to a Federal Bureaucrat, and never do business with or on behalf of anyone already on the list. That's pretty much the only criteria to get on it. It's considered to be under the auspices of "Foreign Policy" so is under the sole discretion of the Federal Executive.
A few years ago, I'd tell you if it's a NATO ally, odds are at some point they are wired into OFAC. The choice is, do business with the American financial system, or get added to the sanctioned. There's a reason why I said the American Financial system is wired for soft power projection. We were big and trustworthy enough where just going along with it to maintain access to things made the act of checking a list that thusfar, no one had too many objections to the people who ended up getting added to it was just a no brainer.
Then... an ICC judge got sanctioned, finally making apparent how the U.S. really intended the mechanism to be used; as an "our way, or the highway" sort of thing. So I'm far from able to make any informed guesses on who is still honoring the commitment or not. The Cheeto-in-Chief has done a marvelous job at encouraging everyone to reassess the longevity or reliability of Pax Americana, sooo...
As for how to move assets out? If you aren't on the list, just move em somewhere else. Just not to anywhere on the list. If you are on the list, kiss your assets custodially held goodbye til the ole' U.S. of A decides to take you off the list, which at a minimum is probably going to require some very uncomfortable chats with people you don't want to be alone with.
Again, there is a reason I left. There is a reason I have no desire to return, and why I've basically opted to live life extra hard mode, because I can't just accept that it's okay for the Government to orchestrate financial lockout; and even less reason why we should all be gungho to implement systems like that. Canada has one, I'm pretty sure Great Britain and most of Europe each probably maintain their own as well. You'd have to check. I understand why a country would seek to have one, and operate one. I just can't consciably be involved in it. The abuse potential of the capability is too damn high. "Good guys in office who wouldn't be stupid enough to abuse such a thing" cannot be said to be a given. I wasn't comfortable with the Orange Man sitting on the nuclear football, nor am I comfortable with him on OFAC or anything else his position now entitles him too.
If I sound like a paranoid nutter, I sympathize, sounds pretty fantastic right? I once thought the same thing about a guy who used to work for the Postal Service who tried to tell me that "Oh, hell no, USPS will absolutely open main in transit for a myriad of reasons. At the time, I took it with a grain of salt. Now... I realize he was absolutely telling the truth. If it's a network, we (the U.S.) will do everything in our power to maintain the ability to tap, manipulate, and control it. I just want help machines move bits from A to B man. Not be a cog in sovereign theft/freezing of assets of the politically/diplomatically inconvenient/disfavored. Violates the Moral Imperative.
Here's the lists btw. Enjoy.
https://sanctionssearch.ofac.treas.gov/
Was really the first time in my life I started looking at and appreciating databases as the weapons they are.
If only there was some sort of alternate monetary system based on cryptography that enabled instant micro payments.
Using a public ledger, that is just surveilled and treated as prosecution futures, or targeting for kidnappers. Yes, we know. It's also got major usability issues, and tends to end up in practice defaulting to a centralized custodial model anyways for the vast majority of users. Where it can't, the onramps to convert to the currency of the land are outlawed.
By sanex 2026-02-205:35 Still would work for the use case.
By julianeon 2026-02-200:56 This is me w Google Gemini. And you're right: it does change your outlook on micropayments, which in my case, are API calls. My costs for the last few days: 3 cents, 2 cents, 46 cents. Believe it or not, every one of those calls was scrutinized and justified.
By jaredwiener 2026-02-1922:13 But you're not doing micropayments, you're using metered billing. There's a big difference.
For one, you have a request. The answer isn't going to be anywhere else. Sure, you can't be guaranteed the quality in advance, but you are guaranteed to not have an answer without submitting the request. This doesn't work in a field where so many see news as commoditized, and can just get a free article or headline elsewhere.
Micropayments have been tried over and over (see https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/08/the-poster-child-for-micro...)
Some of this issue is the nature of news. With an LLM, the providers just run the infrastructure anyway, and your request is routed to it. They develop new models constantly, and deploy. News does not work like this.
If you have to grab someone's attention to read an article, that's an incentive structure that creates clickbait and other things people hate. You may offer a headline, but that is very often the only part of the story people care about. (Oh, Robert Duvall died? That's sad. But I don't need to pay anything to read anymore -- I already know the story!)
It also does nothing for the piracy that is so rampant -- especially on this site. How many people post archive links to articles with paywalls? Would that stop? Getting a fraction of a cent or so before someone else copies the article is absolutely not a business model.
By reactordev 2026-02-1922:261 reply I think a token system where $10 gets you 1,000 tokens and each read is logged and costs 1-5 tokens, depending on severity of the news and its age, is a great idea.
By NicuCalcea 2026-02-1922:461 reply Who determines severity? What about investigations that take months or years to produce, who counts how many more tokens they should cost compared with a news story about Trump's latest tweet? Do you get a popup asking if you want to pay x tokens for each link?
Journalism micropayments have been tried many times before, and never worked. Things haven't substantially changed in the meantime, so what would be different this time? I'm genuinely curious, I'm a journalist, so I'd really love to find a working funding model for quality media.
Readers who payed (and only those) could vote on a scale whether the article was worth the payment? The amount payed might even be calculated into the vote, e.g. you payed one token and get one vote, I payed two or three tokens and get two votes.
By reactordev 2026-02-1923:59 And for those long investigation stories, you can sell the series cheaper up front and give access to all the stories related to that case. Or nickel and dime each post.
Curiously, LLMs seem to be the first successful use case for micropayments.
Possibly this happened because a) the vendors only offered a micropayment model and b) the product was so popular that nobody pushed back.
That said we can see LLM inference being sold on a subscription basis commonly now (e.g. Claude Code).
By easton 2026-02-1922:09 A lot of cloud services sorta work the same way. AWS and Azure are pay per request for all sorts of things, I figured that was the model the inference providers were following.
By robinsonb5 2026-02-1923:17 The in-world items you could buy in Second Life two decades ago using Linden dollars were arguably a successful use case for micropayments.
You could buy and sell virtual items with a real-world cost far smaller than the transaction fees of a regular card transaction.
Speaking of which - that, to my mind, is the definition of a micropayment - a payment too small to be practical to administer using existing card payment infrastructure. So-called "micropayments" in games have long since ceased to qualify under that definition - they're just "transactions" now.
By Ethee 2026-02-1922:10 I would consider a lot of mobile apps to also be a 'micro-payment' type model. Clearly there's no issue with people paying for content, I think the real gap here is in the ability for the consumer to pay for the content. If I go to some random news site and it hits me with a paywall for a micro-payment there isn't a simple system by which I can actually give them money without directly signing up for a subscription to that specific site or some other service. If there was a type of wallet for this that I could just put money into and sites asked "would you like to pay X amount from your wallet to read this content?" I would be more amenable to it. It's the same idea with streaming sites and piracy. Companies have made content more expensive and more exclusive so why would I want to jump through the extra hurdles which was supposed to make consuming your content EASIER. It's always about ease of access to the consumer.
You can't pay $.001 to $0.05 to get someone to do actual reporting.
By antonymoose 2026-02-1923:441 reply How much is an ad impression worth on your local paper?
By boplicity 2026-02-200:03 I don't know -- but I'm a paid subscriber to 4 newspapers.
By akst 2026-02-200:06 I would love the option for pay for usage for many products I am forced into paying a subscription for.
I think one legitimate difficulty with micropayments for a news site (that has a few options to solve) is the reservation price of most readers for a single article might be lower than the cost of handling the transaction. The best option I can think of is the user needs to add credit their account or a credit card or something, which isn’t uncommon but I think some people might see it as a grift where they pay for more than they’re initially getting.
I think one benefit of it or shortcomings is it’ll probably kill off portions with smaller readership, but if that’s not you -you’re no longer paying for something you weren’t reading.
Micropayments work for games because there is some specific outcome I know I want and know paying this money will move me closer to that goal in the immediate future.
That isn't the case for news content. In news it's "reading this might be interesting" or being generous "knowing this might improve my life at some point".
That delay in outcome will kill micropayments because it again goes from a very easy calculation in your mind to "too hard" like Clay talked about.
By bluebarbet 2026-02-1922:23 Thank you for responding to the actual article rather than (like many others here) going straight to pre-cooked talking points on micropayments.
I also don't have any proof that the article will be any good. When buying a whole newspaper for the day, if some of the articles are suboptimal, I can still make money from the reliably good stuff. But if I go look at an article, am I getting something good, or is it regurgitated Reuters I read before, plain AI, or completely wrong? The barrier is too high if I don't have a lot of faith in the source, and if I do, I should just subscribe
By BobaFloutist 2026-02-1921:39 Sure, but if a source routinely clickbaits you/has a worse than expected article, you learn to avoid it (or even add a "don't show me this source" rule).
As long as the sources last long enough for reputation to build naturally (so, not the Amazon LLC model), it should all come out in the wash pretty reasonably.
By onyx228 2026-02-1921:14 I've spoken to a german news outlet a while back, and that was my contention too: I don't know if the article will be any good.
My suggestion was as follows:
Start the article by providing the dry facts - the meat of the article - in a super condensed format, so people get it as quickly as possible. Then, ask for money to get the rest - the analysis, the "whodunit", the "how we got there", the background, the bio's, and everything else. And then tell people: "If this interests you, you can pay $0.xx to read the rest of our article about it, including: (insert bullet points I just mentioned)"
The first section acts as proof that the person writing the article did their research; the rest is for those who are genuinely interested in the topic. It prevents disappointment and tells you clearly and transparently what you're getting for you cents.
I don't think the company did it in the end. They're struggling.
By sanex 2026-02-1921:50 But if you're only paying a penny the risk is tolerable.
I think the site is right about the "coins" method. If I had an automatic subscription of $10/month to refill my news wallet, and I could pay $0.05 out of it to read an article, I'd do it, especially if it was a use-it-or-lose it system.
In fact, if they charged $0.20 per story if you pay directly, or $0.05 per story if you pay out of your auto-reload wallet, I think that could incentivize users to subscribe.
Of course, it would have to be shared across every newspaper, and publishers hate that. Apple News is the closest it's gotten - the app sucks, but you can share articles into it to remove the paywall and that works great.
By Edman274 2026-02-1921:17 Handle it this way - a user has Silver tier coin subscription, gold tier coin subscription, and platinum tier coin subscription that they pay in per month. I'll set hypothetical prices at 15, 30 and 60 dollars. Over the course of a month, you look at articles without making decisions about whether to buy them one way or another - you just have your "tab" and the article loads as-is. Then, at the end of the month, mycrowpaymint.biz tallies up how many articles you read * each article's relative cost multiplier from what different news sites (15% forbes, 30% percent NYT, 10 percent utne reader, 45 percent random YouTube videos) and then remits the subscription revenue to each publisher based on the percentage used. For flexibility's sake, maybe the publisher was hoping to get 17 dollars coin based, PAYG revenue off of a 15 subscription at 80 percent utilization, but them's the breaks, because in other months they'll get more revenue than they would expect because a customer engaged with less content overall. Obviously, the existence of tier limits would be for those cases where someone tries to look at a thousand different articles on a silver plan, and perhaps Financial Times would only allow Platinum subscribers to work with this plan, but the reduction in friction, ease of subscription management for the customer, and equitable financial allocation would (I believe) make such a scheme viable.
People already can't be bothered clicking on the paywall busting links to view articles because the friction is too high. Having to decide if something is potentially worth 20 cents seems easy when you have to make that decision in your mind a single time for something you're obviously interested in but in reality it becomes multiple times a day for things that you are maybe only slightly curious about the fatigue will add up very quickly and I double anyone would do a second reload(if they do the first load at all).
By onyx228 2026-02-1921:08 That is a correct evaluation of this. I've worked in marketing for a longer while and your instincts are spot on.
In media generation, such as music, streaming, articles, etc the only thing that gets people to fork over money regularly is if they're a fan of some sort. The patronage system. That means they have to like you and come back to you so often that they'll feel a connection - and they'll want to support you out of the goodness of their heart. This is the strategy used by streamers, by buskers on the street, and by content creators of all sort.
The main issue with applying this to articles is that most news is discovered by way of google news, or a similar hub site, which sometimes will present news from you - but it won't happen often enough to create such a connection. One may ask if the frequency of this happening is deliberately that low, compared to social algorithms on other products, where return visits are encouraged - if you like a tweet, you get more tweets from that same person; if you like a short, you get more youtube shorts from that channel; and so on.
Ultimately for news you have to be so large that people will come to you on their own, without being funneled through google news. This works for huge news sites - the register, NYT, Golem, etc. There is no way for a small site to break through like that. I think the last time I've seen this get pulled off successfully - a website started from 0 generating a cult following - was Drudge Report.
By zerotolerance 2026-02-1921:24 "Community" might be the hook, not the content itself. That's the way it works right now even in the pure editorial garbage piles. They might not always pay for the content directly, but they get revenue through high-margin merchandise, advertising, and scams. But you might imagine positioning as "I'm a XYZ reader." Still feels weak, but that's all we've got. The internet killed content scarcity. The product is not the content. The product is the way reading / watching / paying for it makes you feel. It is church. It is a tithing. A community subscription service.
By akoboldfrying 2026-02-1923:471 reply > "reading this might be interesting"
I find it hard to take this objection seriously, since almost everything that isn't a physical commodity has some degree of "I don't know if I'm satisfied with this yet". Books and movies clearly do. But we expect to take a risk and occasionally pay for them, and it feels ordinary to do so -- so why not here?
I don't object at all to people not liking micropayments -- I don't like them either. But the reason I don't like them is because I'm accustomed to getting good quality content for free, and no other reason.
With books, movies, tv shows, music almost everyone is discovering based on recommendations or curation. Very few people are consuming much of that type of content with no outside input on its quality or interest. News is almost always a blind link with just a headline to work from.
By akoboldfrying 2026-02-202:571 reply The headline is a pretty big clue about what's going to be in the article, I think. (Though maybe headlines will become more coy, to entice readers to pay for the full article? We already see this with questions-as-headlines.)
Most of the news I read comes from the same handful of familiar sites, so I have a good idea of what I'm going to get, especially if they include an author byline and I recognise it. "Niche" news sites would do well to continue offering a small number of freebie articles to entice those who chafe at the thought of spending $0.40 on something they're Not Completely Certain Is Really Worth It.
By sanswork 2026-02-203:19 It's a clue of what its about but it's not the same as a recommendation that its going to contain something you enjoy.
So every click is a decision on an unknown and that's where the problem comes in. You read the headline now you have a decision to make, is it worth spending money to continue. For longer form media your return on good stuff is going to be at least an hour of entertainment. For news you will almost certainly be done the article in 30 seconds on less. So you decide to click, you read the article, it's good, it's now 30 seconds later and you read the next headline and you have another decision to make, do I pay for this? Thats where the decision fatigue comes in and why it's so quick with this model. Even if it's just a penny you're not thinking well clicking this will only cost a penny, you're thinking do I really want to pay to see what the other side says?
And if you're at the point where you're spending a lot of time on a single source even if it costs more it generally makes more sense just to subscribe since then you are making a single decision once a month.
Maybe initially you wouldn’t know if an article would be good. But over time you could probably make reasonable guesses from the author/headline/title combination.
Great now I need to pay attention to the authors and make a mental mapping of who the good ones are to decide if the friction is worth it. That in itself adds more friction which in turn makes the barrier higher.
By BobaFloutist 2026-02-1921:391 reply I mean that's just how reading works.
By sanswork 2026-02-1922:42 It isn't with news though. I am a bit of a news junkie and have actually subscribed to multiple news sources over the past year and I can't name a single journalist from any of them and I am almost certainly average in that way.
By abdullahkhalids 2026-02-1922:141 reply What about movie rentals on various platforms like Youtube. They are more in the domain of "milli"-payments, but they do share the feature that you don't know if you will like the movie until after you have watched part of it.
By sanswork 2026-02-1922:44 With a movie rental I'm paying $5-30 for a 1-2 hour experience where I have some idea going in of what I'm getting thanks to trailers and I'm making that decision maybe once a fortnight if that.
The scale of the decisions doesn't align.
By muyuu 2026-02-2020:48 absolutely, the problem of the cognitive friction of having to decide what to pay for compounds massively when there uncertainty about the purchase, and the negative experience when the user feels that he or she has been essentially scammed because the purchased product is not what was expected far outweighs positive experiences that are perceived at best as just the expected transaction
