Why micropayments aren’t dead…yet

Far from being a failed experiment, we need to think bigger when it comes to micropayments.

With the rise of subscriptions and paywalls comes the realisation that there’s a large chunk of a publisher’s audience that they may never be able to effectively monetise. Only an estimated 5% of a publisher’s digital readership will convert to pay for a full subscription, according to Digiday.

But what’s the alternative? Micropayments are one of the alternative revenue streams touted by hopeful tech start-ups and half-heartedly trialled by some organisations. But the number of publishers who have wholeheartedly experimented with micropayments are still minimal, for better or worse.

But perhaps our hope that people will pay a pittance for our work is setting the bar too low. Maybe we’ve been thinking about micropayments all wrong.

Why we need to look beyond subscriptions

Let’s start with why we need an alternative. The basic issue with paywalls is that if every publisher put up a hard paywall overnight, people simply wouldn’t be able to afford to take out subscriptions to all of them. Many readers of this article will read widely around other outlets — add up the cost of a $10 a month subscription to each publisher you’ve read today, and the figures will most likely soon stack up to become unaffordable.

This is a line of reasoning that many top media people have already picked up on. Buzzfeed CEO Jonah Peretti said back in 2018 that they wouldn’t consider a paywall as they wanted to focus on educating and informing the broader public. “If every news organization puts the majority of their content behind paywalls, it’s hard to have an informed electorate,” he argued.

Chris Duncan, the managing director of Times Newspapers Ltd, believes that paywalls are only viable for a tiny number of international news brands, and highlighted his concerns about outlets that can’t scale in an interview with the Drum in late 2017.

“There will be a few people — maybe no more than 10 — who will be able to charge a large amount of customers for a direct subscription. Then there will be a number of [free] sites that will be at a global…