In Digital Media Lost the Newsstand. Micropayments Are the Obvious Way Back, Rick Bruner makes the case for giving micropayments another try.

The internet has dramatically diversified reading patterns. In the print era, readers subscribed to a small, fixed set of publications constrained by geography, distribution, and cost. Today, thanks to search, aggregators, and social sharing, readers routinely consume journalism from dozens of sources in the course of a month, including international and niche publications that were previously inaccessible. This has expanded total news consumption while weakening the economic link between any individual reader and any individual publisher. As a result, large portions of valuable readership generate little or no direct revenue. Micropayments convert that fragmented, currently untapped demand into incremental revenue without undermining the subscription base.

And—like any other payments directly from readers—micropayments would be a multiplier for advertising, not an alternative.

In a marketplace increasingly distorted by bot activity and opaque platform reporting, micropayment histories give publishers a powerful, independent way to demonstrate the authenticity and engagement of their audience, strengthening their position with advertisers and supporting premium pricing.

The 404 Media team explains the value of a known human audience in We Need Your Email Address. Meanwhile, Subscription revenue is growing at big news publishers even as traffic shrinks, and that’s good news for legit sites—stuck in a struggle for ad budgets with Big Tech oligarchs who want to bury us in deepfakes, extreme right wing bullshit and AI slop until nobody trusts anybody.

Clay Shirky’s old argument against micropayments from 2003, based on mental transaction costs, doesn’t work so well any more. We know that micropayments can work because mobile games are a thing. Shirky was probably right for the micropayments of his day, but mobile game developers have figured out how to get people to spend money on in-app-purchases (IAP), by turning it into a two-step process.

• exchange real money for in-game coins—which feels like you’re not spending, just exchanging one currency for another.

• exchange in-game coins for an in-game asset—which feels like you’re not spending real money.

A brilliant cognitive trick that works in all kinds of games. Of course, it doesn’t work on everybody. Figure about half of adults play mobile games, and about 80 percent of those make an in-app purchase. But if the numbers for a pay by the article system were similar, that would result in enough payment records to enable an advertiser to tell a legit site—where somebody spends a coin every so often—apart from an AI slop site.

So it doesn’t seem like micropayments are necessarily unworkable⁠—⁠and with a powerful industry devoted to pushing misinformation and slop, legit content needs every human attention metric it can get—but the tricky part is how to introduce micropayments. Publishers look at their subscriber metrics and realize that a lot of subscribers read few enough stories that they would save a lot of money by canceling and using micropayments instead.

So it might be better to introduce publisher coins as a bonus feature for subscribers, then let them leak out to non-subscribers. Instead of saying that you get 5 gift articles per month, say a gift article is 20 coins and you get 100 free coins a month. Then open them up to more uses. Another good lesson from how mobile games handle IAP coins is that they hand out a few to non-buyers to help develop the habit. As part of a direct sold ad deal, legit sites could issue a stack of coins to legit advertisers, to hand out to customers, event visitors, and others.

Measuring marketing is already hard enough without a determined set of adversaries in the picture. And with Big Tech under pressure to obfuscate and enshittify every data flow, marketers will need to look harder for trustworthy information. Rick Bruner again:

ROI for most advertisers is falling in inverse proportion to Big Tech valuations going up. Advertisers are steadily paying more for less ROI, and Google, Meta, and Amazon are laughing all the way to the blockchain.

If there is one thing marketers have even heard about causation — which, of course, is the ultimate point of advertising, causing consumers to buy your product who wouldn’t have otherwise — it is that correlation is not causation. But AI, you see, is nothing but correlation. Very fast and very sophisticated statistical inference. The fact remains that to truly know what is having an effect, you need to conduct a randomized experiment: subjects assigned at random to a test or control group, presented with an intervention where they are either treated or not with the stimulus of interest (the ad), and measured against the outcome of interest (incremental sales).