[ogrisel]

Similarly, for paywalled news/journals.

[bandrami]

Fifteen years ago people were talking about micropayments per article for news services being just around the corner. What ever happened to that?

[thayne]

A big problem with micropayments is that the transaction costs tend to dwarf the actual payment, which isn't good for the buyer or seller. I don't think it is an unsolveable problem, but there are significant network effects that would need to be overcome.

[Maakuth]

AFAIK it never pans out really. People turn out very stingy if they're faced with a decision to pay or not to pay for every article, so the revenues end up a lot lower than what the subscription model would pay.

[elnasca]

When people are confronted with the actual cost, they tend to say no. With a subscription, their head tells them that for 10 €/$ they get an infinite number of articles.

[carlosjobim]

A ton of newspapers actually tried micropayments (something like 50c per article). Almost nobody was interested, consumers do not want micropayments.

I believe instead that the future for textual content is mass syndication, just like it worked out for video content and audio content.