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.