Few Americans pay for news when they encounter paywalls

I was pondering this earlier today while manually prepending archive.is to a pay walled link on my Android phone for the umpteenth time today.

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.

Micropayments are a constant financial stressor and source of friction. You're never quite sure how much you're going to consume/pay, you're constantly having to make a choice every time you read something, and there's no way to say "Actually that click wasn't worth 10c".

Tiny local papers are mostly all owned by the same company anyway.

People do actually pay for subscriptions or donations if they like the content enough. In the UK the Times, Financial Times, and Telegraph all run on subscriptions, and the Guardian is a weird - but successful - kind of donation-ware.

Also Substack and Medium.

The alternative is aggregation - like Spotify for news, but without the cutthroat ethics. Pay a fixed amount, possibly tiered, read what you want up to your tier, and the aggregator distributes the income.