Why doesn’t the news industry allow consumers to pay per article instead of forcing everyone to sign up for monthly or annual subscriptions?

Here’s what would happen if the entire news industry rolled out a micropayments solution tomorrow: For the first few days, there would probably be a huge surge in purchases, but most of that activity would be driven by the novelty effect.

Pretty soon, consumers would get tired of being nickel-and-dimed for every piece of content. It would become mentally exhausting to decide whether each individual article is worth paying for every time they hit a paywall. Eventually, they would default to not paying, in much the same way many already default to not subscribing when they encounter a subscription gate.

That’s because the amount of effort required to convince someone to go from paying $0 to $1 isn’t all that different from what’s needed to get them from $0 to $100. News organizations would end up spending enormous resources convincing readers to buy $1 articles that don’t generate much revenue in aggregate, all while potentially cannibalizing their more lucrative subscription businesses.

So why don’t publishers band together and create a single sign-on platform where consumers pay a monthly fee that’s distributed among outlets based on what they actually read — basically a Spotify for news?

Well, that product already exists in some form: Apple News+. And while it’s an interesting model, I don’t think it can ever achieve the same ubiquity as music streaming services.

When Spotify launched, it only needed to convince a handful of major music labels to participate. Just as importantly, those labels hadn’t spent the previous 15 years building their own direct-to-consumer, all-you-can-eat subscription platforms.

The news ecosystem is much more fragmented. There are thousands of publishers, many of which already operate their own subscription businesses. It would be an extremely difficult sell to convince enough of them to join a universal bundle, especially if doing so meant sacrificing subscription revenue in the short term.

Maybe a company like Google or Meta has the scale to pull off that kind of hat trick, but those companies have spent the past decade sowing enormous distrust within the news industry, making widespread publisher adoption unlikely.

No matter how you slice it, micropayments aren’t the silver bullet many people think they are. And my guess is that most people who say they want a pay-per-article model would get tired of using it pretty quickly.