Honestly, I have money. I just wish I had a convenient way to give it. If micropayments were easy, I'd make them. The Onion has been pestering me recently about a subscription. There's no way I'd subscribe... but I can guarantee I would pay 10p or 10¢ if they let me. Same goes for online Guardian articles.
There are few online news sites I would commit to subscribe to (except LWN, Linux "Weekly" News), but I would gladly micro-pay or tip for many individual articles if it was convenient and secure. Preferably some trustworthy third party service, not a site-specific feature.
I don't want advertisements to be the answer. Ad blockers are easy to install. When I disable my ad blocker and Ghostery, I'm reminded of just how blighted mainstream news sites have become by ads, social media buttons, and floating sidebars.
On the other hand, pay walls and subscription-only content reduces public access to news and the sites' Google juice.
The metered paywall seems like a decent approach though. You can view X articles for free in a month. So if you just occasionally land on an article, you don't need to pay. But if it becomes something you look at regularly you need to buy a subscription.
The problem is that paywall pricing is often wonky.
The NYT, for instance lets you read 20 articles per month for free. But wanna read 21? $15/month ($180/year).
[In reality, of course, it's trivial to get past the NYT's paywall, but that's not really relevant.]
If you read, say, 50 articles per month, that's about $0.50 per article ($15 for the 30 articles over your 20 free ones), which for most articles, even in a quality paper, is way too much.
I guess the papers basically reason that it's like a paper subscription but a bit less... but that doesn't really reflect the way people read papers electronically. When you buy a physical paper, you often read a lot of it, and it serves as a major part of your news. You feel like you got a pretty good value from your investment (and the physical medium aids that feeling, even if it's a waste). But people get news on the internet from tons of different sources, and the value of any one paper is a lot less, even if you like it a lot.
I value papers like the NYT because they actually do a lot of important things (e.g. sending reporters into war zones, and doing deep investigative journalism), but the gut feeling of "value" for their digital subscriptions simply isn't there in the same way it was for the physical paper.
I'm thinking actually, perhaps the solution to micropayment tips would be Bitcoin. It seems ridiculous, but it would allow you to bypass credit card processing fees, at least once the money is actually in the system.
P.S. Ok, the following is not thought out much at all and is very incomplete. My point, if I can better make it, here, is that you limit users' exposure and risk via the micropayment channel. And thereupon say, if the current balance does disappear (stolen, gaff, etc.), it's simply "not the end of the world" for that user. Fix the problem and move forward.
On the receipts side, I have less to offer in terms of ideas for control of fraud. (E.g. accumulating masses of mis-appropriated micro-transactions.) For identifying and addressing user claims of mis-appropriated transactions. Etc.
So, I sort of have what I see as "step 1": Keep the users "safe". I imagine step 2, "control fraud", has some technical remediations.
And, overall, keep this system separate, in it's own transactions "box", away from the larger banking and payments system. Compartmentalize. And then solve, within that more limited scope.
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Technically, this seems quite feasible. However, the regulatory infrastructure gets in the way. I'm not arguing for mindless "deregulation". (Or, as it were in recent years, also lack of enforcement.)
But it seems there needs to be a new class of payment for these things. A user has a limited value account presenting limited exposure/risk. Money can be pushed into it from a regular bank account, but it's an irreversible, one-way flow. The user, as an example, puts in $20, $30, $50 per month and then uses this to make low-overhead micropayments. Since exposure is limited, regulatory overhead can be kept lower. And... regulation can in turn help ensure that such accounts and micropayments are created and do exist. (E.g. Conventional banks: You must support this interface to micro-payment providers as part of your license or charter. In return, you face no liability beyond possibly restoring a mis-directed withdrawal of capped value made to "charge" one of these micro-payment accounts.)
I'm no banker. But it seems to me that micropayments need a regulatory infrastructure that reduces/caps risk, and that also in-turn squeezes out needless and overly expensive overhead.
Sort of like a pre-paid Visa card, but online. (And preferably with lower transaction fees.)
Why would society do this? Why do we protect intellectual property, increasingly to the point of criminalizing infringement (and so subsidizing enforcement)? Society attaches value to this. Well, I think a good part of society attaches value to compensating and enabling (legitimate) content creators. In terms of a news, many of us want to see an informed society -- one informed by independent, self-standing reporting and not just propaganda.
