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.

I’d even pay a respectable amount more than that, but it needs to take like 3 seconds tops with no typing. Heck, the faster it is, the more likely I’d be to impulse buy more content from the same place.

I’d be fine with some up front work to create an account and associate a payment method or something, but not on each individual site. PayPal pretty much fits the bill for me for most transactions, where is PayPal for microtransactions?

Several years ago I (briefly) worked at a startup that was trying to do this for publishing (but has since pivoted into generic ad-tech). My impression at the time was that most publishers weren’t onboard. True or not, they seemed to think if you’d pay a penny for an article then you might but a subscription and so they want you to make an account, want your contact info so they can send you spam, etc.

The other issue is that big name publishers saw micropayments as eating into their subscription revenue and weren’t interested, but without them it was hard to put together a compelling enough bundle of sites to overcome the signup friction for users.

I still think it’s a good idea but I don’t see how you overcome those obstacles.

I think the only way that will ever come about is an implementation by an existing incumbent. Like, let's say Apple added some kind of web microtransaction support – essentially every user already has payment details registered with Apple, and a tiny "pay 10¢ to read this article" banner would likely to be easy to implement result in almost zero friction for the user.