Back in 2009, CNET had the article Micropayments: The business model that never was.

Micropayments are a worse fit with today’s Web environment than during their first boomlet in the dot-com era. Part of this is simply that people have gotten used to free news and other content on the Web. There are also more sources of news than ever–albeit much of it duplicative and often relying on major news organizations for source material. However, more broadly, linking and search have become such fundamental drivers of traffic that anything behind a pay-wall (as subscription-only content inevitably is) will take a huge traffic hit. This makes such content less relevant; it also hurts ad revenue.

I agree with those arguing that micropayments are again raising their head not because changes in technology or consumer behavior now make them viable.

I am not sure it was right back then and less sure that it is correct now. The economic war that is being fought against independent news may be a sufficient to bring back the idea.

Democracy At Work has the episode Economic Update: The Great Replacement Theory.

In this week’s show, Prof Wolff discusses the replacement theory’s grain of truth amidst its mostly ideological function: to save capitalism from criticism. He analyzes why US capitalists deprived so many white, male, Christian workers of their jobs, incomes, and social standing over recent decades and why that analysis was largely silenced by Cold War taboos since 1945. Were a new US left-labor alliance now to offer that critical-of-capitalism alternative, replacement theory’s notion of a great conspiracy (largely by Democrats) to replace white, male, Christians with “others” would be far less socially influential.

In the second half, Richard Wolff comes very close to proposing a solution.

I left a comment to try to push them onto the target he came close to seeing.

The solution for getting the story out there is right in front of you, but content creators just don’t seem to see it. Content creators need to form a cooperative that will provide the means to get the word out and support the livelihoods of the content creators. This cooperative would provide a subscription service that gives access to the content-creators and provide them micropayments from the paid subscriptions. The micro payments would be given out in proportion to the subscribers’ consumption of content creators’ product. As a proponent of everything Co-op, you should have the knowledge of how to do this. Why don’t you do this?