Micropayments as a reality check for news sites • Hacker News Board

Re: Micropayments as a reality check for news sites

#81

Post by w10-1 » Thu, Feb 19, 2026, 9:41 PM UTC

The title bar of the browser should report how much you've spent in the time frame you select, and the cost of a given article in both absolute and percentage terms.

Along with silly privacy/cookie flags

Then one click you can approve both, or set a policy to auto-approve any site with minimal cookies and less than 0.01%/mo of your budget.

Then ideally when you're done you click red/yellow/green buttons to close the site, indicating whether you were happy with the result. (And set your policy to avoid sites you dissed.)

Then also when you hover over a link you get a pop-up with the same rate and quality info, as text or icons.

It's easy and provable at small to large scales. It just takes coordination.

As motivation, this could enable site-side price discrimination, to maximize revenue. That could drive privacy features...

Re: Micropayments as a reality check for news sites

#82

Post by DaiPlusPlus » Thu, Feb 19, 2026, 9:42 PM UTC

ummonk wrote: post #79

In my ideal world I’d subscribe to a service with a monthly subscription fee where the service takes a small cut and then converts the remainder into a use-it-or-lose-it tip balance (perhaps with the unused balance being auto-donated to a selected journalism nonprofit). In exchange for this subscription, news providers, bloggers, etc. would unpaywall their articles to me, knowing that by doing so they’re vying for a…

Isn’t that “Basic Attention Token”?

Re: Micropayments as a reality check for news sites

#83

Post by AlotOfReading » Thu, Feb 19, 2026, 9:42 PM UTC

bscphil wrote: post #69

makestuff wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't this the main complaint people had about cable packages though? People were tired of paying $100/mo and only watching 10 channels out of 150. I came across a startup awhile ago that was handling the micropayments for you and you paid a monthly subscription fee which is similar to what you want. I think the main issue is getting every publisher to agree to onboard to your platform before you have sufficient scal…

This is totally hypothetical, but I wonder if a system whereby your dollars went to the publications you actually read, but you could immediately, at any time read anything else you wanted for free would work. There would be an obvious reason to subscribe (you get past the paywall for any publication that is part of the bundle) but you would have the feeling that you're not "wasting" money because your money only goe…

Isn't that the YouTube premium model? You pay a fixed monthly fee, Google takes a cut and the rest is divided among the channels you watch. It's supposedly in proportion to the watch time you've allocated to each of them, but I'm not sure that's ever been confirmed.

Re: Micropayments as a reality check for news sites

#84

Post by beeflet » Thu, Feb 19, 2026, 9:42 PM UTC

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #63

> We know that micropayments can work because mobile games are a thing. Paying $1.00 for an in app purchase that you thought about and decided on is not a micropayment, that's just a small payment. What makes micropayments interesting is that they can be small enough to escape notice, except in aggregate. They happen in the background, tightly coupled to the thing they're for, and not as part of an explicit purchase…

There should be a new word for the not-exactly-micro-micropayments that the author describes. I suggest "minipayments".

As you, I associate the micropayment idea with truly tiny individual payments. Like paying for bandwidth by megabyte, where each payment is much less than a cent.

The risk of fraud due to any individual payment not being fulfilled is low. At most you loose 0.01c of money, and the vendor loses $ of potential business.

Re: Micropayments as a reality check for news sites

#85

Post by Gigachad » Thu, Feb 19, 2026, 9:43 PM UTC

makestuff wrote: post #58

subpixel wrote: post #51

I pay for subscriptions, several, but I am never going to pay one publication a small fee every time I read an article. That model is completely counter-intuitive and punitive to the consumer. What I _would _do is pay a flat fee to subscribe to several publications. That's the only path: to give people more value than they expect for less money than they expect. It could be multi-tiered: the more publications you sub…

Isn't this the main complaint people had about cable packages though? People were tired of paying $100/mo and only watching 10 channels out of 150. I came across a startup awhile ago that was handling the micropayments for you and you paid a monthly subscription fee which is similar to what you want. I think the main issue is getting every publisher to agree to onboard to your platform before you have sufficient scal…

It's a misunderstanding of the payment model really. No one watches 150 channels, the pricing is based on you being the average person who watches a subset of them, but it doesn't cost them any extra to provide all of them.

Regular users also don't really like usage based fees which is why every consumer plan has a fixed price rather than paying per use. Cloud storage for example charging you for "up to x gb" rather than "$x per gb".

Re: Micropayments as a reality check for news sites

#86

Post by boplicity » Thu, Feb 19, 2026, 9:45 PM UTC

You know who isn't arguing for micropayments for news articles?

Pretty much every damn publisher.

Nobody who wants to build a stable business would want to depend on micropayments.

Such a system would be a race to the bottom, just like garnering "Facebook likes" and similar "virality" is a failing proposition. (And look at what happened to companies like Buzzfeed, who were focused on just this.)

We have a huge problem in our society, of people not valuing journalism, and not wanting to pay for it. Here on HN you regularly see people attempt to actively subvert copyright (by linking to "archive sites"), in addition to the constant drip of criticism when publishers do things to try to build their business, such as collect email addresses, use paywalls, etc.

Publishers need reliable, stable, income, not the lottery type system that would come from micropayments. They need to be paid to do journalism, not write articles that convince people to spend "coins" on them.

Fortunately, publishers are actually figuring out how to build stable businesses. There's still a lot of work to do, especially in terms of local journalism, but it's clear that there is no future for micropayments, based on what seems to actually work.

And please, I beg you, set aside a budget to support journalists, and spend it.

Re: Micropayments as a reality check for news sites

#87

Post by Gigachad » Thu, Feb 19, 2026, 9:46 PM UTC

beeflet wrote: post #64

AndrewStephens wrote: post #33

I get the sentiment but micropayments just don’t work - the main problems are not technical but social. Even in the gaming sector, nobody really charges less than about a dollar for items - that is the smallest unit of money where putting up with fraud, complaints, and chargebacks becomes worthwhile. Add to this the huge race to the bottom (they are charging 3 cents for their article, read my summary for 2 cents) and…

The problems you describe are technical problems. How do you increase efficiency and avoid charge-backs due to fraud? Perhaps it is enabled by cryptocurrency (some systems like payment channels, RaiBlocks already exist for this). I would go into more detail about this but I think i've already debated you about this already. The entire field of cryptography is about developing technical solutions to previously intract…

That just moves the fraud to the other direction by making it hard for legitimate chargebacks. Say someone steals your card info, then uses it to buy some news crypto.

Re: Micropayments as a reality check for news sites

#88

Post by Ericson2314 » Thu, Feb 19, 2026, 9:48 PM UTC

There's two possible futures

- give up capitalism for information, and rely on UBI and gov grants for art and media

- make the market great again with micropayments and subscriptions

Both of these have problems, but also both are better than ads, which have been an unmitigated disaster.

Re: Micropayments as a reality check for news sites

#89

Post by boplicity » Thu, Feb 19, 2026, 9:48 PM UTC

fmajid wrote: post #45

I have a patent on micropayments for the Web from 1996. 30 years later, the situation hasn't changed and Clay Shirky or Andrew Odlyzko's arguments around the mental cost of microtransactions remain valid. Besides subscriptions to individual publications, the only model that would work is a Spotify-like subscription for a bundle of sites, with the revenue shared according to page views (or better, some metric that doe…

News companies already have syndication, and revenue sharing based on it. A subscription to a newspaper often includes many articles written by other newspapers, distributed via syndication agreements.

Re: Micropayments as a reality check for news sites

#90

Post by SllX » Thu, Feb 19, 2026, 9:48 PM UTC

dynm wrote: post #65

There is a lot of hate for the idea of micropayments here, so I'd like to offer a counterpoint. I use a service that provides access to a bunch of different LLMs. Each time I call an LLM I, in effect, pay a $0.001 - $0.05 for the response. (Technically, this is implemented as me having to renew earlier.) Each time I make a call, I don't know if the answer will be useful. I don't even know how much it will cost! And i…

Newspapers were already bundled that way: you got national news, local news, business news, sports, the funny pages, classifieds, wire stories from AP & Reuters, etc.

Then they went onto the web and were forced to prioritize, but where the entire bundling idea falls apart is you’re suggesting that we bundle the bundles.

Here’s the harsh reality: most news is already priced appropriately for the value that it delivers to most people, and for most people, most news is worth $0.00.

I pay for the news I want to read already, both websites and podcasts, and I pay directly for it. But no matter how many New York Times or USA Today or other random news links my friends send me, or whatever else I run into on the open web when I’m checking someone’s sources, I will never pay greater than $0.00 for it. Not $0.99, $0.01, not $0.001, not even $0.0001. If I have to engage in a financial transaction just for clicking a link, then I’m not clicking the link and I’ll start demanding that citations to be delivered to me in a form I can read instead, and probably stop providing links in turn. Other people will do the same.

And for those rare publications that people both want to read and also are willing to pay for en masse? Stuff like the Wall Street Journal? They’re never going to devalue themselves by getting in the bundle. Even with Apple News which famously has a partnership with the WSJ specifically, they withhold their most valuable stories, the stuff that people buy the Wall Street Journal for because they’re the value drivers in any potential partnership. Almost every other publication that would stand to benefit would in effect be free-riding off the WSJ’s largesse.