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.

Feels like this could be a good opportunity for Apple Pay (or Google Pay) to offer a microtranscation service specifically for newspapers. They could offer an SDK so implementing it is easy on the newspaper side, and they could offer better terms for them so that it's actually worth charging 1 € without paying 0.90 € in transaction fees.

Actually i saw bloomberg doing this a couple of days ago, it was “subscribe for 1.99 a month” and you could use apple pay. [1]

I thought then that they could also use this to just sell the articles for 0.49 or something, since it significantly reduces friction.

But then again the proportional transaction fees for a small amount like this are probably too high.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-06-23/tesla-rob...