Few Americans pay for news when they encounter paywalls

You are wrong. There have been multiple attempts at micro-transactions - and they all failed. One of the biggest was Blendle - https://www.pugpig.com/2023/08/18/why-micropayment-champion-...

Why? why do most B2B companies prefer subscription based pricing? Because it brings in predictability you can run a business on. Micro-transactions only work in utility context (electric, water, cloud compute). You can't run a news company on micro-transactions.

> Micro-transactions only work in utility context (electric, water, cloud compute).

And nearly the entirety of retail sales. When I buy something at a store, I don't have to have an account, subscription, or anything of the sort. I can just grab the thing I want, fork over the price of that thing, and get on with my day.

Aside from logistics, the problem with microtransactions for news that I can see is that it would encourage only the more sensationalistic news and discourage the more mundane news that is likely more important for people to know.

Is predictability not essential for electric, water, or cloud?

I didn't understand why news can't run on postpaid pay-per-use model, which I think you are implicitly referring. Note that pay-per-use isn't necessarily implying micro-transactions; we pay utility bills just once a month, and cloud is either postpaid pay-for-use or prepaid credits that are deducted based on usage.

It is essential, but the ones I mention are something that is very hard to do without. While there are alternatives they're not widespread and require significant shift in operating style to roll out. Newspaper content is not a necessity so it doesn't work the same way.

> And nearly the entirety of retail sales

Not really? Retail is mostly driven by normal transactions.

> Aside from logistics, the problem with micro-transactions for news that I can see is that it would encourage only the more sensationalistic news and discourage the more mundane news that is likely more important for people to know.

Exactly - it essentially kills journalism that requires a lot of upfront research or work.

That's not a micro-transaction. It's a transaction, plain and simple.

I was a Blendle user until I realised it was simply too expensive. Even with refunds, the disappointment of paying 23 cents (rather than 2.3 cents, or 0.23 cents) for an underwhelming article was not a good experience.

Let's look at the economics, back when I was working in the paywall industry you had roughly 10% of users reading more than 5 articles on an average medium.

Let's say that you could get 2 % of these people to pay you $10 per month. With a readership of 1M that would mean you'd get (1000000 * 0.1 * 0.02) * 10 * 12 = $240k per year.

Now let's move that over to blendle, let's say that the average reader reads 1.2 articles per month (since most people only look at 1 article). Let's be super generous here - with a much larger conversion rate - 10 % of everyone buying 1 article per month month on average comes up to a comparable amount 100000 * 12 * 0.23 = $276k per month. And we're being generous here, remember - blendle abandoned this model so it almost certainly isn't equal to the metered model I used in my estimation above even if more users are willing to pay.

Now if you bring down the payment to whatever you're proposing you get to $27.6k or even 2.76k per YEAR. The napkin math is clear that this isn't feasible.

Interestingly enough you'd pay less as a "heavy reader" if you read 10 articles per month (which is a super small % of users on an average medium) with blendle (10 * 0.23 = $2.3) than with a subscription costing $10. But making the users count articles likely isn't great psychology as compared to buy and read everything you want. Which likely is perceived as a higher value offer.