In Digital Media Lost the Newsstand. Micropayments Are the Obvious Way Back, Rick Bruner makes the case for giving micropayments another try.
The internet has dramatically diversified reading patterns. In the print era, readers subscribed to a small, fixed set of publications constrained by geography, distribution, and cost. Today, thanks to search, aggregators, and social sharing, readers routinely consume journalism from dozens of sources in the course of a month, including international and niche publications that were previously inaccessible. This has expanded total news consumption while weakening the economic link between any individual reader and any individual publisher. As a result, large portions of valuable readership generate little or no direct revenue. Micropayments convert that fragmented, currently untapped demand into incremental revenue without undermining the subscription base.
And—like any other payments directly from readers—micropayments would be a multiplier for advertising, not an alternative.
In a marketplace increasingly distorted by bot activity and opaque platform reporting, micropayment histories give publishers a powerful, independent way to demonstrate the authenticity and engagement of their audience, strengthening their position with advertisers and supporting premium pricing.
The 404 Media team explains the value of a known human audience in We Need Your Email Address. Meanwhile, Subscription revenue is growing at big news publishers even as traffic shrinks, and that’s good news for legit sites—stuck in a struggle for ad budgets with Big Tech oligarchs who want to bury us in deepfakes, extreme right wing bullshit and AI slop until nobody trusts anybody.
Clay Shirky’s old argument against micropayments from 2003, based on mental transaction costs, doesn’t work so well any more. We know that micropayments can work because mobile games are a thing. Shirky was probably right for the micropayments of his day, but mobile game developers have figured out how to get people to spend money on in-app-purchases (IAP), by turning it into a two-step process.
exchange real money for in-game coins—which feels like you’re not spending, just exchanging one currency for another.
exchange in-game coins for an in-game asset—which feels like you’re not spending real money.
A brilliant cognitive trick that works in all kinds of games. Of course, it doesn’t work on everybody. Figure about half of adults play mobile games, and about 80 percent of those make an in-app purchase. But if the numbers for a pay by the article system were similar, that would result in enough payment records to enable an advertiser to tell a legit site—where somebody spends a coin every so often—apart from an AI slop site.
So it doesn’t seem like micropayments are necessarily unworkable—and with a powerful industry devoted to pushing misinformation and slop, legit content needs every human attention metric it can get—but the tricky part is how to introduce micropayments. Publishers look at their subscriber metrics and realize that a lot of subscribers read few enough stories that they would save a lot of money by canceling and using micropayments instead.
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