[spartas]

The publication is still paid a bit for the article when money in the fund is distributed to "all publications participating in the payment system". This presents an opportunity for low-effort publications to crank out oodles of articles in the hopes of getting people to either pay for articles or get paid out by the fund.

Why would I, as a reader, choose to participate in your Kafkaesque payment system when the prevailing solution is to contact my card issuer and dispute the transaction? Certainly that takes a lot less time than having to phone the NY Times (because they do not allow you to cancel a subscription through the website).

[dwohnitmok]

> The publication is still paid a bit for the article when money in the fund is distributed to "all publications participating in the payment system".

That was a throwaway implementation of a "black hole," there are many others. Although in this particular case that failure mode is handled by proportionality. If they don't make a lot of money they won't get a lot of money (if they make no money they get no money). It's still gameable to some extent by paying for your own articles, but that becomes a bet that you will globally have more disgruntled readers choosing to withhold payment than the cut taken by the payment facilitator, which is a risky bet. There's no risk-free moneymaking opportunity that I see here.

> Why would I, as a reader, choose to participate in your Kafkaesque payment system when the prevailing solution is to contact my card issuer and dispute the transaction? Certainly that takes a lot less time than having to phone the NY Times (because they do not allow you to cancel a subscription through the website).

The point would be that it isn't a subscription and that everything is a la carte so there is no convoluted cancellation process. There's no reason (and no real incentive) for the payment facilitator to make any of this hard to use, unless the number of users who decide to withhold payment is truly gargantuan. Blendle demonstrates that it would be even easier than contacting your credit card issuer (although Blendle used refunds).

The real nail in the coffin is that people in general don't want to pay a la carte and businesses like subscriptions better anyways since the revenue stream is much more stable and, as in the case of the NYT, there's quite a bit of friction for a user to stop paying. A do-nothing default of "I get money from users" vs a do-nothing default of no money is too juicy to pass up.

I think payments a la carte for articles will really only work for individual, part-time writers, who don't have the infrastructure in place to demand a subscription or otherwise don't like subscriptions.