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Comment by montrose | Hacker News Reader

It's not simply miserliness that makes people reluctant to pay for articles online. It's also because subscribing is so much work. If you could pay 50 cents for an article with a single button click, a lot of people would do it. But filling out a subscription form and getting out your credit card and typing in a 16 digit number off it just to read a single article (which is all one wants at the point one is being asked to subscribe) seems like way too much work.

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And what is more, am I supposed to subscribe to all sites where I occasionally find valuable content?

One of the good things about internet journalism is that I can read different publications very easily, every day. Some of them I'd actually like to pay, but not by way of a subscription, because paying for five or ten subscriptions at ~$30 per month each is just too much.

With paper newspapers, I can at least buy a single issue. With online articles, it would be feasible to pay per article, heck, even per half articles or whatever. But for some reason all the publishers come up with is obnoxious paywalls, and the option to subscribe or get lost. I honestly don't understand why micropayments haven't become a thing for online journalism.

Is there potential for a news article broker to sit between the readers and the major news sites? For example you credit an account on a news broker then when younwant to read an article the article access fee is deducted from your account. That avoids readers needed to subscribe to many newspapers or magazines and would provide a more friction free way to access specific articles.

Yes, something like that would work. I guess the biggest problem is to get the major publishers as well as the readers to work with this broker.

Flattr had a similar problem, you could pay-per-article via their button, but as I understand the adoption just wasn't sufficient, by both publishers and readers.

Maybe if publishers could add a micropayment button that used ApplePay/GooglePay/AmazonPay/PayPal, so that readers wouldn't have to sign up for an additional service and could just use their credit card in a one-click transaction.

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