That's because there is no FB-level money to be made in "microtransactions in exchange for content", especially news content, and nobody cares for those firms, including Medium which has posted its second "We've failed to make any revenue, but pivoting to some vague BS" post by now.

They don't even need it to be a significant amount of their income. But they could show that some people are in fact willing to pay, which may be enough to entice big publishers to supply content to Facebook again, closing the loop on the original idea of "outsourcing [news] distribution".

But maybe, I say, it never took off for a reason? Some things are just not what people want.

(Though of course all the content providers crave them like crazy)

No one (practically speaking) accepts micropayments because there's no unified system with good UX, and no one can build a unified system with a good UX because no one is accepting micropayments. Facebook could change all that in the same way that MS can push a feature to Windows and instantly make a new market. Barrier to entry looks different when you're a de facto monopoly.

With so much "free stuff" on the internet, it's almost impossible to convince that your content is worth more than an infinite increase in value (1¢/free =infinite ). The "big guys" like the WSJ or IEEE can, simply by being close to canonical.

I don't think it is as simple as that. It is a fiasco at face value. Only if we think those smart people running Facebook and Google really thought Lizard People and Chemtrails believers have turned around the election and now they are on a noble mission to rescue us from such horrors, because you know, they are pure and noble, and not evil. At least that is how they framed it.

But I think it was a about something else. It was a signal to powerful advertisement buyers that traditional media (TV news channels, newspapers etc) have failed at manufacturing consent, and they shouldn't waste their money on them anymore. That market vacuum can now be filled Google and Facebook - "Don't let fake news ruin your next campaign. Come to us. We'll make sure only true news gets out".

Newspapers -> broadcast TV -> site based web -> network based web

I'd argue that network based web looks a lot more like the wild west days of hyper newspaper competition than broadcast TV. Fake news is essentially peer sourced yellow journalism. And I'm amazed publishers didn't see that coming -- there's historical precedent!

This was nice while it lasted, but it was facing a lot of flak for it. Several news outlets were talking about how facebook was censoring news and only allowing 'democrat/liberal' news and blocking news from more conservative news outlets (which tend to be terrible, but oh well)

So they had to shut it down, and set up algorithmic news aggregator, which lead to the fake news problem.

It's too early to know if this particular website will be successful but this is the idea of how to get curated quality content with self sustained micro transactions. This might be a better incentive than fake internet points.

This will resurface the sensationalist headline-grabbing click-optimized shenanigans of ViralNova and UpWorthy of the past, and you won't believe what happened next.

I can't imagine Facebook going up against those household names.