micropayments as a reality check for news sites

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Newsstand lost in digital media. Micropayments are the obvious path back, Rick Bruner makes the case for giving micropayments another try.

The Internet has dramatically diversified reading patterns. In the print age, readers subscribed to a small, fixed set of publications limited by geography, distribution, and cost. Today, thanks to search, aggregators, and social sharing, readers regularly consume journalism from dozens of sources over the course of a month, including international and niche publications that were previously inaccessible. This has expanded total news consumption while weakening the economic relationship between any individual reader and any individual publisher. As a result, the vast majority of valuable readers generate little or no direct revenue. Micropayments converts that fragmented, currently untapped demand into incremental revenue without diluting the subscription base.

And—like any other payment directly from readers—micropayments will be an multiplier for advertising, not a substitute.

In a market increasingly distorted by bot activity and opaque platform reporting, micropayment history gives publishers a powerful, independent way to demonstrate their audience’s authenticity and engagement, strengthen their position with advertisers, and support premium pricing.

404 media The team explains to us the value of a known human audience in need of your email address. Meanwhile, subscription revenue from big news publishers is rising despite falling traffic, and that’s good news for legitimate sites — which are stuck in a battle for advertising budgets with Big Tech oligarchs who want to bury us in deepfakes, extreme right-wing nonsense and AI slop until no one trusts anyone.

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

  • Exchange real money for in-game coins – it feels like you’re not spending, just exchanging one currency for another.

  • Exchange in-game coins for an in-game asset – making it feel like you’re not spending real money.

A great cognitive trick that works in all types of games. Of course, this doesn’t work for everyone. Estimates suggest that nearly half of adults play mobile games, and about 80 percent of them make in-app purchases. But if the number of payments by the article system were the same, it would result in enough payment records for the advertiser to be able to tell a legitimate site – where someone spends a coin from time to time – apart from an AI slop site.

So it doesn’t seem like micropayments are necessarily impractical⁠—⁠and with a powerful industry dedicated to promoting misinformation and sleaze, legitimate 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 so many subscribers read so few stories that they would save a lot of money by canceling and using micropayments instead.

So it would be better to offer publisher coins as a bonus feature to subscribers then leak them to non-subscribers. Instead of saying you get 5 gift items per month, let’s say one gift item is worth 20 coins and you get 100 free coins per month. Then open them for more use. Another good lesson from how mobile games handle IAP coins is that they hand out some to non-buyers to help develop the habit. As part of a direct-selling advertising deal, legitimate sites may issue wads of coins to legitimate advertisers to give away to customers, event visitors, and others.

Marketing is already difficult enough to measure without a defined set of competitors in the picture. And with Big Tech under pressure to make every data flow nebulous and obfuscated, marketers will need to pay more attention to trustworthy information. Rick Bruner again:

The ROI of most advertisers is falling in inverse proportion to the rising valuations of Big Tech. Advertisers are constantly paying more for less ROI, and Google, Meta, and Amazon are laughing at blockchain.

If marketers have heard one thing about causation—which, of course, is the end point of advertising, getting consumers to buy your product who wouldn’t otherwise buy—it’s that correlation is not causation. But AI, you see, is nothing but correlation. Very fast and very sophisticated statistical inference. The fact is that to really know what effect is being had, you need to conduct a randomized experiment: Subjects, randomly assigned to a test or control group, are presented with an intervention where they are treated with or not the stimulus of interest (advertising), and measured against the outcome of interest (incremental sales).

marketing fog

Unfortunately, there are legitimate sites out there. Right now Big Tech companies are quietly pushing in-browser ad attribution tracking systems through the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). This is technically a complex proposal, but the aim is to centralize attribution measurement at a single chokepoint per browser vendor, so that we can safely predict what attribution reports are going to look like. beep, boop, the
optimal place to spend your ad money is . . . whatever Performance Max
(or other Big Tech ML) says is the right place to spend your ad
money. If any attribution tracking reports start looking favorable to legitimate sites – and potentially cost Big Tech billions of misinformation and sloppy operations – then management will simply demand changes to code, policies and personnel until the numbers come out the way they want.

The survival of legitimate sites depends on how quickly marketers can access things like rickcentralcontrolcom/geo-rct-methodology and not just dump money and customer data into Big Tech and get conversions. The problem with marketing today isn’t that marketers have become “too technical” and ignored the creative secret or whatever – the problem is that marketers are afraid to appear “non-technical” by asking tough questions.

Anyway, going back and reading this now shows that Rick Bruner has won the content marketing thing here. Get people thinking about micropayments, and that will leave the question of how to tell which sites are real, with so many gatekeepers interested in providing false answers? (And destroying the legitimate economy and crushing democracy, but that’s another story).

Where do micropayment systems go from here

There’s so much on so many sites now, let’s just say, that it’s worth reading through the malarkey before looking at the actual page.

  • “Consent” dialogues (which don’t involve actual consent anyway, as Professor Daniel Solove points out)

  • email newsletter signup

  • prompts to allow notifications

  • Sign in with (company name here)

A micropayment platform that can either eliminate them or act as a front end for them, consolidating to zero or removing that one hurdle before a read, will be a win for user experience (and revenue). Submitting yet another thing to click on already long-suffering users is not the way to bring people back to the web. More: Friends, it’s time to sharpen your pencils



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