If there was a privacy preserving micropayment system that charged pennies for per news article across a wide variety of news sources, I'd sign up immediately. But what I don't want is a micropayment system that just turns into a big tracking system to track my reading habits across a wide variety of news sources.
Pennies per article is a absurd markup. The normal rates I see on the internet for ad-supported businesses is on the order of 200 cents per 1000 views, or 5 views per cent. If they charged you even a cent per article they are already marking it up to 500% of their ad-supported rates.
If there was a privacy preserving micropayment system that charged pennies for per news article across a wide variety of news sources, I'd sign up immediately.
There was a service like this maybe 10 years ago.
You subscribed to the service and then you could pay something like 3¢ or 5¢ to read different articles.
The problem was that it didn't carry the entire newspaper, only "featured" articles. And it only had maybe a dozen periodicals in its collection.
