On the topic about scaling, I'd give serious thought to a "Spotify model" for it if there was such a service that included enough sites.

> Micro payments cannot come soon enough.

I know I must be missing something here, but what is actually preventing a service where a number on your account (which you have funded with $10, because lots of quality news and content sites are signed up to it) decreases by 00.10 and someone else's number (whose article you just paid to read) increases by 00.10?

One the face of it, this seems like the easiest thing in the world to accomplish, particularly for already established, trusted and extensively used payment-related companies like Paypal.

> Micro payments cannot come soon enough.

Any idea how to encourage quality content with micropayments? The naive implementation would be to charge on opening the article, but I suspect that would just encourage more click-bait headlines. Short articles can still contain good content, so just tracking reading time wouldn't be sufficient either.

Blendle allows no-question refunds, and it seems to be working very well. I think you'd have to do it that way.

For the Bitcoiners, there's the nano-paywall from https://satoshipay.io/ . (I'm part of the team working on this). We're currently trying to integrate fiat payments too, which would make this a browser wallet of sorts that can be used to pay micro-amounts to publishers. Still early days, but think we're on to something with a lot of potential.

Pay a fixed amount every month to a third party that redistribute money to all the articles that you "liked" with a button.

That's the model of Flattr. I have no idea how successful they are though.

https://flattr.com

I have a Flattr account, but I only use it for regular contributions to a couple of open source projects, since I never see a button anywhere.

Being in the content game, it's because it's totally not worth littering pages for the 5 cents a month it'd make.

I'm hyperbolizing, but even if it were $100/month, it wouldn't be worth the space. What this space needs is someone with deep pockets to subsidize the publisher growth until the critical mass of users is reached.

Micropayments have been the obvious - to me - solution for this problem since I got on the internet in 1997. Still never seen it employed anywhere. Yes, heard of flattr. Never seen a single site that uses it.

I feel like unless it's opt-out per article, you'll forget to click often enough that the price of clicking will have to be high