I have a patent on micropayments for the Web from 1996. 30 years later, the situation hasn't changed and Clay Shirky or Andrew Odlyzko's arguments around the mental cost of microtransactions remain valid. Besides subscriptions to individual publications, the only model that would work is a Spotify-like subscription for a bundle of sites, with the revenue shared according to page views (or better, some metric that does not reward clickbait).

If they don't want to be stiffed on royalties like how musicians get pennies from Spotify, news sites will need to establish some sort of co-op to host this, and not rely on the likes of Meta or Apple, as tech companies have proven treacherous to the news biz many, many times before.

News companies already have syndication, and revenue sharing based on it. A subscription to a newspaper often includes many articles written by other newspapers, distributed via syndication agreements.

> Clay Shirky or Andrew Odlyzko's arguments around the mental cost of microtransactions remain valid

What about iTunes, and money transfer apps like Venmo and Zelle, which people use widely for microtransactions (and more)?