Few commercial news and information sites sell stories. Instead you pay a fee to access the site for a period. This is, in part, due to the cost of processing the payment. Thanks to the work of PayPal and others that is about to dramatically change.
Several companies have new technology on the cusp of release which makes handing payments of even cents easy and cost effective. This will enable consumers to purchase a full story for download quickly rather than going through a laborious registration and payment process. This will bring more traffic online and allow writers and publishers to build online revenue. It will more fully unlock the Internet as an alternative channel for selling content on a per story basis. Róbert Párhonyi, Lambert J.M. Nieuwenhuis and Aiko Pras of the University of Twente in the Netherlands have authored an interesting report on the new generation of micro-payment solutions.
It’s a paradigm shift. Whereas today someone pays me A$1.00 to buys the Herald Sun, in this new world they could take a story on page 3 and pay a few cents for it. But only online.