Online micropayments is still a woefully untouched market, it was supposed to be the wave of the future some years ago, but never went anywhere.

I won't pay 10 dollars a month (each) to the NYT (LAT, WaPo, et al) for a subscription I might quite happily pay 5 to 20 cents for an article though. I can see a service that functions a lot like EZPass, you load your account with 5-10 bucks, you agree to pay by clicking a payment button on a landing page on a website, the rest is mostly automatic, require more than just a click thru for anything larger than say, 25 cents. You could even set it up so it doesn't prompt you to pay until you're more than half way thru too.

Yes, It'd take some doing to build infrastructure and get content providers online, but it would eliminate a lot of the mechanics of paying for news, information, online media and other like content (as well as many of the privacy and practical concerns of ad based content payment).

The big thing is to make it content agnostic, it can't be part of apple, google, facebook, whatever, it needs to be something that functions just as a payment/escrow service, not part of some other media empire - part of the utility of such a service is universality. I'd also steer clear of person to person payments, large transactions, pretty much just be a one-trick-pony (at least until you have wide penetration), and only go after small payments - all of those other markets are well served by a multitude of providers, and would serve as a distraction from the primary product.

> I won't pay 10 dollars a month (each) to the NYT (LAT, WaPo, et al) for a subscription

What about a Spotify model for articles where you pay a monthly subscription to access all articles from the NYT, WaPo, LAT, Guardian, Independent, Telegraph, Le Monde, Der Spiegel, The Economist, Nature, National Geographic, Scientific American, London Review of Books ... ?

EDIT: I guess this is what Blendle is, as mentioned in a sibling comment, except Blendle seems to be pay-per-view and I'm suggesting monthly subscription. Presumably Blendle could also offer monthly subscription.

Note that it does seem to work reasonably well for the "adult" industry. People are often reluctant to pay for recurring fees on those sites (social stigma plays a role there, probably). But "pay-as-you-go" or pay per view schemes seem to fare far better. And, it makes sense; why pay for a monthly thing when the moment of enjoyment is relatively short. A DRM free download for that thing you like is mentally easier to justify. The big hurdle is still sign-up and credit cards I think, I'd personally be much more inclined to use systems with more privacy conscious approaches: since micropayments give an opportunity to track /exactly/ what you're looking at. This might even be more relevant for news outlets that cover a wide range of topics and writing styles.

Saw https://blendle.com/ posted on HN a while back. Works exactly like that.

Blende is great! I have zero problems paying for good reading material but I don’t want to pay 5 $10 subscriptions. Blendle just lets me pay per article.

They are based in the Netherlands, my home country and they have deals with all major newspapers here, so I am not missing out on anything.

I highly recommend you give this a shot.

Note: I am not associated with Blendle in any way. Just a happy user spreading the word.

Not sure if you are Dutch, but if you follow dutch news then you'd known the soap bubble 'blendle' has burst already... Afaics they are at the brink of bankruptcy, and needed multiple financial injections to 'survive' and papers like NRC, FTM and recently the telegraaf have already pulled their publications.

Today the people behind blendle launched a new product, Medianieuwsbrief.nl To me another pointer that blendle is no longer viable and they are looking for new products.

They are what others describe causing brand erosion, as they collect articles from lots of sources, readers will forget/not know who actually wrote the article, which newspaper the good articles come from etc.

I am Dutch. Born and raised. I moved out two years ago though so I am not completely up-to-date with all the recent development.

Jeez. I didn't know the situation became that bad. I didn't notice because I mostly read American news. From what I quickly read on for example NRC [0], they pulled their content because Blendle introduced the concept of a subscription and that would cut profits for NRC.

The new concept Medianieuwsbrief.nl looks like a last resort kinda thing. I doubt it would take off.

[0] https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2017/03/07/waarom-nrc-stopt-met-bl...

Alexander said to be inspired by https://www.mediagazer.com For their new site.

That new site hurts my eyes :)

Does it work as I suspect: you pay, and yet you still get ads too?

No ads in my experience. You should check out the beta and see what you think, I still think it's running. You receive a few dollars in credit to try out the platform. Personally, I really love it.

Nope, I never saw a single ad. You open up the app, pick and article that looks interesting to you and you can start reading. When you click, you pay a small amount, the price for an article is always clearly displayed.

Oh c'mon. I cannot endorse a cool product? They're from my home country, I like their product and I'd like to see people use these kind of services where authors actually get paid instead of through ads.

Hijacks my back button..big no no

Can someone explain to me why hijacking of the back button is even possible? It's obviously something that browsers could fix, and the fact they don't fix it means that there must be some legitimate uses. But what legit use?

In this case I think it doesn't hijack your back button. The first page redirects to a second page, and they both end up in your history. If they used history.replaceState() then you'd only have one entry in your back-stack. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/History_API

In a perfect world, it would be used by single page apps that are driven by JavaScript to provide the same benefits of linking, history navigation, and so on, without having to actually load a new page.

Think an online webmail client, where each time you view an email it adds a new item to your history.

JavaScript apps. If you dynamically load content using js, the user will likely expect the back button to undo that change.

What exactly does it make the back button do that you don't like? It seems to work fine for me.

> it was supposed to be the wave of the future some years ago, but never went anywhere.

I remember when Peter Sunde's Flattr was around (circa 2010) and websites had flattr buttons (like those html/css buttons).

Edit: I just checked and apparently it still exists: https://flattr.com/

Yes it exists, but has been bought by Eyeo. That's the company behind AdBlock Plus, whos' business practices are one of the reasons why so many people have switched to uBlock Origin.

Edit: And it has already started: Eyeo has made major changes to how Flattr works (now they decide who gets your money, and how much of it, not you) and hiked the prices.

I think it is untouched market, since there were many attempts and it didn't work. I call it a "micropayments dream"... publishers dream about it, but it is not going to happen. I personally would not pay 5 cent per article, since I don't want the burden in the back of my mind to evaluate, if that particular article was "worth" 5 cents. Also, if there is a commentary which goes against my opinions, I might want to read it, but not pay for it.

I would totally pay 5 cents just to see if an article is good. I think the price point will vary wildly from person to person. For me, 50 cents is probably where I start getting price sensitive. I would pay 50 cents for a long form article from a publisher known for high quality, and 5 cents for your average news article.

I won't pay 5 cents for something I may not like, but at 1 cent, I may.

One big disincentive (at least for web articles) is that I tend to not know the actual value of the article until after I've read it. I don't want to pay 50 cents for an article, only to read it and realize they just copy-pasted a press release from Intel and did no actual reporting

We really need web standards for a "web wallet" and for micropayments. Something managed locally by your browser, preferably in some sort of separate sandbox. And then you'd be able set a per-site budget.

However, it feels like is something the big boys don't want to handle as a standards because there's too much money at stake if they get a piece of the pay themselves, i.e. Apple Pay & co.

The Web Payments API was actually created just a few months ago (or at least gained public notoriety).

https://www.w3.org/TR/payment-request/

It's already in Chrome and Edge, coming to Safari:

http://caniuse.com/#search=web%20payments

Have you read much about the Brave browser and the token system it's trying to implement? It's very similar to your proposed solution.

I don't really have any interest in bitcoin and various cryptocurrencies, but that sounds perfect for this sort of thing, no?

Online, asking for $1 is asking for someone's credit card info.

Right, and Mirimir has no credit cards :(

I used to argue for Bitcoin, but at $6K that's crazy.

However, a EZPass-like token funded with cards, cryptocurrencies, money in the mail, etc. That would be cool.

Being pedantic; the fluctuation is what’s crazy, if they started at $6k it’d be no problem because you’d just think in terms of thousandths of BTC (or even satoshis) instead of whole coins.

The problem is the transaction fees needed for timely confirmation.

> I used to argue for Bitcoin, but at $6K that's crazy.

Well, Bitcoin may not be good for micropayments, but that's not the reason; you don't have to have integer numbers of bitcoin, you can have 0.00016666 bitcoins (~$1 at $6k/BTC).

Lightning Network, coming soon to a blockchain near you.

Real Soon Now™. It's pretty much vaporware at this point.

What about Raiden (for Ethereum) though, it is already on the test network.

Yes. But it's the transaction fees. Sorry to not make that clear.

What's the transaction fee on a Bitcoin transaction these days? Minimum $1.50? With a 15- or 30-minute delay on confirmations?

Not for micro- nor instant-transactions.

Yes, that was my issue. I normally set ~0.5 mBTC, but that's $3 now. That gives you an hour or less. At ~0.2 mBTC, it can take hours to confirm. However, for small payments, some accept with no confirmations, and just eat any loss.

This seems relevant: "Ripple, XRP and Micropayments", https://xrphodor.wordpress.com/2017/09/17/ripple-xrp-and-mic...

I like you. I have had an IRL theory/behavior pattern like that for some time. If you need something modest like a dollar so much that you find a return on your time to ask random people for a dollar (or $2.75 for a ride on the subway) then you need the dollar way more than i will miss it, so if I have one I often give it out. There but for the grace of god go I.