Few Americans pay for news when they encounter paywalls

The micro-transaction proposals everyone cried about in the early 2000's would have been so much better than this.

The odds of me paying for a subscription for some tiny local newspaper on the other side of the country are literally nil, but I'd be far more willing toss you a penny or two to read the content of a single article.

Unsolved, difficult problems of micropayments:

pay before viewing: how do you know that the thing you're paying for is the thing that you're expecting? What if it's a rickroll or goatse?

so do you give refunds a la steam?

pay and adverts: double-dipping is very annoying

pay and adverts: how do you know who you're paying? A page appears with a micropayment request, but how do you know you've not just paid the advertiser to view their ad?

pay and frame: can you have multiple payees per displayed page? (this has good and bad ideas)

pay and popups: it's going to be like those notification or app install modals, yet another annoyance for people to bounce off

pay limits: contactless has a £30 limit here. Would you have the same payment system suitable for $.01 payments and $1000 payments? How easy is it to trick people into paying over the odds (see refunds)?

pay and censors: who's excluded from the payment system? Why?

Part 2: business model problems!

getting money into the system is plagued by usual fraud problems of stolen card transactions for pure digital goods

nobody wants to build a federated system; everyone wants to build a Play/Apple/Steam store where they take 30%

winner-take-all effects are very strong

Play store et al already exist, why not use that? Yes it takes 30%, but how much does the micropayment system take?

Free substitute goods are just a click away

Consumers will pirate anything no matter how cheap the original is (although: Spotify)

No real consumer demand for micropayments

=> lemma from previous 3 items: market for online goods is efficient enough to drive all marginal prices to zero

existing problem of the play store letting your kid spend all the money

Friction: it would be great if you didn't have to repeatedly approve things, such as a micropayment for every page of a webcomic archive. But blanket approval lets bad actors drain the jar or inattentive users waste it and then feel conned

First most obvious model for making this work is porn, which is inevitably blacklisted by the payment processors, has a worse environment for fraud/chargebacks, and is toxic to VCs (see Patreon and even Craigslist)

Internet has actually killed previously working "micropayment" systems such as Minitel, paid ringtones (anyone remember the dark era of Crazy Frog?); surviving ones like premium SMS and phone have a scammy, seedy feel.

Accounting requirements: do you have to pay VAT on that micropayment? do you have to declare it? Is it a federal offence to sell something to an Iranian or North Korean for one cent?