Perhaps there is a market for some kind of service that allows you to make small 5 or 10 cent charges. All of these charges are grouped together and you make a payment at the end of the month in one go so the the fees are reduced.

Or it could work the other way round, you top up your 'account' with amounts from, let's say, $10 upwards.

This could be monetized by charging businesses to integrate your service into their products.

I had an idea for a startup around this, and got pretty far in spec'ing it out and seeing what could be done. But what I found, when reading about previous attempts, was that the technical and business side weren't the barrier to entry, it was the legal problems that arose. Whenever systems like this have popped up, it's a matter of days before organized crime and others game the system to do things like launder money.

It's unfortunate, but it seems as though the only entities with the legal and administrative teams capable of handling that are the credit card companies. And they're not particularly interested in micro-payments, it seems.

I agree that organised crime is the main adversary to such a system, but I believe I have developed a miraculous mix of technology to thwart them that this margin is unfortunately too narrow to contain.

One of my ideas in this space was post-pay micropayments. Instead of asking for money up front and then allowing people to spend that in a trickle on individual articles, you would count views to stories by people (logged to user table or just using a cookie) and then guilt-induce people to donate.

"You've read 46 articles over the last month. Contribute $9.20 now (20c per article) - we'd really appreciate it."

I think skype could do this (and frankly, I'm mystified that they haven't), but I know of few other companies that have such a wide user base who keep their accounts charged up regularly.

Micropayments in general are doomed to fail.

http://www.shirky.com/writings/fame_vs_fortune.html

An article from 2003 - that doesn't mention Readability, Flattr, and other new takes on micropayments - is your final word on why micropayments are doomed to fail?

Sometimes it's useful to revisit an idea and look at it with an open mind. The landscape has changed. Perhaps micropayments as they exist in 2011 are doomed to fail as well but I wouldn't jump to that conclusion based on a single 8 year old article.

From the user's perspective, Readability is a subscription service(one that uses pay-what-you-want, but the default is five dollars per month--far from 'micro') and Flattr is a form of donation(notice that it is completely voluntary, unless I am misreading what flattr actually does). Neither are actually micropayments. Both subscription and donation were mentioned in that very Clay Shirky article.

The closest thing to micropayments that has had any success whatsoever have been pay-what-you-want like Radiohead's In Rainbows and the Humble Indie Bundles and even there they get most of their money from the small segment that pays a lot, effectively as a form of donation that subsidizes the people who wish to only pay $0.01(or in Radiohead's case $0)

I have come to my conclusion in 2011 the same way Clay Shirky did in 2003: the trails of dead micropayment services.

I would actually submit that their has been no true micro-payments service other than some credit systems (e.g. XBox Marketplace). Is there a place to sell documents, audio, or video for 5 to 10 cents a piece and getting 60 - 80%? I believe the paper from 2003 is not a predictor of what would happen in Amazon or Apple would have such a system. Both have excellent UI and easy process in buying higher priced media.

UI isn't the problem. The problem is that free is significantly more attractive than even $0.01 and always will be; this has been shown through studies such as this:

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.164...

FWIW Bitcoin lacks processing fees.

Unless you count the chance of losing your money in a Bitcoin-local currency exchange.