Given the substantial success of Google at doing this, any micropayments system doesn't just have to clear the "Will this be better than putting up a paywall?" hurdle for every site it signs up, it also has to clear "Is this better than the largest, most entrenched, most locked-in, most supported, most widely distributed economic engine on the Internet?"
The main problem is reliably identifying who is a legitimate subscriber. I happen to have a robust solution for that problem which this margin is too small to contain.
I think a better solution be an E-ZPass equivalent for the web. Subscribers add credits to their accounts ($1.00 = 100 or 1,000 credits), and publishers can set the tolls for their content however they want, i.e., 1 credit per article, 5 credits after your 10th article, 1,000 credits for a week on the site, etc.
I'm not convinced that micropayments can't work in combination with other revenue models.
1. They charged too little. Far too little.
2. In an attempt to be more viral, they took payment for websites that were non-participants, with the theory that this would entice them to sign up to receive payment. What happened is that they ended up with a pile of zombie cash that they could not touch.
3. They routed everything through their servers, meaning that a large fraction of their costs was controlled by third parties. This is connected to 1.
Some very high profile outlets (WSJ, NY Times, New Yorker, the Economist) might be able to make their own things work, but those are the exception, not the rule.
To make a point, FarmVille is not high profile. It is for everyone who is anyone. On the other hand EA bought a game called Pet Society which had a loyal following whom I knew some of. The first thing EA did was change the payment model and then all hell broke loose. People I personally know started complaining and EA eventually closed down that game. The problem is not in either elitism or micro-payments but rather in the sales approach.
Wouldn't this end up leaving even more money on the table? Spotify pays artists based on their share of total plays.
Say two sites (X and Y) join up to offer a $10/month pass for unlimited access to both sites, with the say pay scheme as Spotify. Site X has 3 times as many articles/videos as Site Y. If every user reads/watches 100% of Site Y's content, Site X may still receive an equal or larger share of the payouts even though users consumed a much lower percentage of it.
The problem I see is that with spotify it's pretty easy to determine the rate of content consumption (e.g. songs or minutes listened). News sites are pretty adept at turning one piece of content into many (multi-page articles or slideshows), and the system would have to protect against that.
I'm wondering why not. Spotify did it for music. Netflix does it for some movies/TV. Why are periodicals not?
Heck, if airlines can band together in FF mile "alliances", why can't newspapers do the same? It would be a good way to start -- subscribe to NYT and get Washington Post + 20 other city newspapers.
Another point to consider is that piracy has had a huge impact on the music, movie and television industries. They had to compete against free. Netflix and Spotify may make less money for labels and producers than DVD and CD sales did, but it's more than they get from everyone who would torrent their stuff instead.
If you bundled unlimited access to multiple publications for a monthly fee, and distributed payouts to publishers based on their share of views/reads, you'd just end up reproducing the current situation, where the competition for pageviews is a race to the bottom.
The idea pops up periodically because it's an obvious one. But nobody has made it stick yet. Not Kachingle, or Sprinklepenny, or Contenture, or Readability.
Naturally I think I have the twist that makes it work, but the base rate on this is so far pretty underwhelming.
I also have a fairly substantial step forward in the tracking technology which underlies it -- the usual methods are borrowed from advertising systems and they are open to all sorts of falsification attacks. It didn't matter because nobody got any traction.
Now here's the kicker -- come up with a marketing deal with various ISPs, where they can include this with their subscriptions. Either as a premium that comes automatically with their higher-speed tiers, or something that can be billed as extra for the lower speed tiers.