There have been several projects that did exactly that. They just haven't really taken off. Like Blendle. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blendle

I see they're moving to a subscription model now too in an attempt to make it more attractive.

I have Blendle along with subscribing to a number of independent outlets, and really appreciate it. I don't want to buy a sub for all the newspapers I might read and it saves a hell of lot of time worrying about whether I've already read too many articles for the month. It's a few cents per read, and as I don't have all day to browse the papers anyway it is very good value. I hope they, or someone like them, really succeed in the long-term. It feels good to be giving money to journalists.

>charge the end customer in some larger amount - say $5 or $10, and then draw down the micro transaction amount as you go.

Wow, I just realized why Steam does this for in-game purchases.

That's also so they can deny refunds for cash balances — once you pay money to their company, you may never receive it back under any circumstances. That way they can 'refund' you games at any time, but not ever have to record a cash transaction to do so. This is, not coincidentally, universal among online video game and microtransaction stores, with the singular exception of Apple who does not compel all purchases through an intermediate currency balance.

Steam only requires the Steam Wallet for microtransactions. Games and DLC are usually bought "directly". Refunds go to the original payment method, unless you explicitly request that it should go to the wallet.

> with the singular exception of Apple who does not compel all purchases through an intermediate currency balance.

Google Play doesn't have one either, FWIW.

Oh! That's news. Thanks for the heads up, I didn't know that about Steam.

Pretty sure that's been the case since they started doing refunds.

My personal experience may have given me an incorrect view on it due to unusual reasons. I appreciate the correction all the same.

Bitpass was an early micropayment startup that was around for a few years. Beanz and Flooz were late dotcom era "micropayment" startups (they were more like gift certificates really) that were very well funded and failed terribly. More recently Kim Dotcom tried it with Bitcache. There are significant problems with the model.

Isn't that basically how Flattr works?

Kind of? Doesn't Flattr have you choose up front how you want to distribute your subscription? I was imagining a system where you don't have an upfront choice to make, but that as you consume content the subscription is drawn down.

That is how most toll systems work. You load up a balance on the card $10/$20 and it deducts every time you cross a checkpoint.

The difference between this and a micropayment platform would be the fees. In the toll system, the fees are paid once. With a micropayment platform, the fees would be per transaction.

There can be a "self hosted" version of such a platform that say each content-provider can host but I am not sure it will work out against the cost of maintaining it includes much more than just hosting (securty, auditing, refunds, taxes etc).

This is really just circumventing the problem. As an end user, I don't want my money to be split up in to all of these random pools that private companies have control over.

This is the answer I envision exactly. The NMA simply needs to offer an annual solution. I think $50 to $100. I have always wondered why it hasn't been done before now also. They complain constantly about people reading their work for free, yet provide no honest mechanism for payments...and expect people to sign up for monthly charges to read one article. Why would anyone pay 5x, 10x to read on article in a paper they know they will not need to read again if they are just researching a particular topic and it comes up in their search results? The rest of the paper is probably dross and yet you are expected to pay for the entire thing and pay for ads etc that have no relevance to you. The quality of the paper would be forced to improve under such a system and they could no longer hide behind forced sub revenues.

I must be misremembering, but isn’t that what paypal did long ago?

From what I can tell as a lay observer, such schemes are likely illegal in the US. Excepting certain entities with specific legal carveouts or very careful navigation of the legal system such as Paypal and Venmo, every scheme that I am aware of in the US is just maintaining an account with a single provider that you charge and draw down for services from that single provider (e.g. Walmart could allow you to make a Walmart account that you can use to pay for goods from Walmart). Circumstantial evidence leads me to believe that the two key aspects that are illegal are: withdrawal (recovering your balance into a fungible form) and 3rd party payment (account is managed by a different legal entity than the entity being paid) with the latter being the more impactful of the two. The reason the lack of 3rd party payment is deeply problematic is that without 3rd party payment the account must be associated with the ultimate provider of the goods/services, so the consumer can not consolidate or rebalance their funds. Therefore, it is highly undesirable for a consumer to maintain a rolling balance which is the only reason for such a scheme in the first place.

As secondary evidence for it being illegal in the US, the scheme you are proposing is pretty much exactly what WeChat and Alipay do in China. It is also exactly the problem that Paypal and Venmo were made to solve, but for some reason they chose much more convoluted and restricted solutions even though from a technical standpoint it is harder to do what they actually did rather than the absolutely trivial technical problem of the fully featured solution which just manages account balances and transfers between them, a literal CS 101 type of technical problem.

Forgive me if this is a naive question, but how is this different from Patreon, but dolled out in smaller ad hoc amounts? Is the legal distinction because with Patreon each user chooses the distribution ahead of time? Couldn't this be worked around by creating a white list of publishers you are willing to support that approves some set limit or transaction amount ahead of time? So as an example I whitelist a newspaper, and agree to pay $.005 per article view?