At the end of an unrelated article, Steven Levy responds to a question from one of his readers (not actually me despite the name coincidence)
Ask Me One Thing
Alan asks, “Why can’t we choose how to pay for online content?”
Thanks for the question, Alan. It’s one that baffles me, too. I do have little tolerance for those who complain when they come across articles that are behind a paywall. At one point, kiddies, everything was in print and you could read nothing for free unless you stood in the newstand and consumed it, hoping the proprietor wouldn’t snatch it away. Folks, it costs money to produce those gems. Admittedly, the news industry didn’t do itself any favors initially by giving its content away online, but now most, if not all, places have abandoned the idea that digital ads alone can fund excellent writing and reporting.
But you are complaining about the lack of choice in how we pay for it. I’m assuming you are unhappy that our current system is subscription or nothing. There’s generally no way to pay a small fee for a single article or even newsletter. How many times have you found a link to something in a newspaper in a town you never visited that might be of interest—and can’t get at it without giving up a credit card to be charged for complete access to news and archives you couldn’t care less about? Literally for decades I have been assuming that an easy-to-use micropayment system will get constructed and implemented. The technical challenges are minimal. Yet despite multiple attempts, none has caught on. One company, Blendle, once promised to “save journalism” with its micropayment system. Last year it announced that it was no longer in the pay-per-article business and was moving to an Apple News–style subscription service that gives access to multiple publications.
The micropayment solution seems dead. Still, when I hit a paywall and can’t access something I want to read, I would certainly hit a button that would move a few cents, or in some cases even a dollar or two, into the account of a publication. It seems so logical. But as all of us know too well, making sense is not a sufficient condition for something actually happening.
The last link there is to a Wired article from 5years ago in which the author expresses exactly the same concern that no micropayment solution has caught on but without any explanation of why that should be the case. The earlier link, though, to a Columbia Journalism Review article from a year later gives more analysis of why the idea may truly be dead. And that is what I want to question here.
The CJR article presents two main arguments for why micropayments are not accepted by publishers. One is the belief by publishers that, of potential readers who are interested in an item, the expected income from those who can be persuaded to buy an expensive subscription (despite preferring a one item payment) is greater than the loss of those who will just turn away. The other has to do with the costs of payment processing.