I, Reader.

I read what’s free as long as it’s interesting, and I read what’s interesting as long as it’s free. When some MSM joint like Wall Street Journal hits me with a paywall requiring that I “subscribe” (pay money in advance for content that might or might not have value for me weeks or months later), I move on. There are many other places I can go to satisfy my curiosity about whatever topic happened to land me there (and which I probably found out about through Digg or some such.)

That’s not to say I don’t value good writing, and it’s not to say I don’t appreciate how hard and costly investigative journalism is. Sometimes when the teaser text appears to be very well-written, I feel a pang of regret when I close the tab. Because, and here’s the thing: I just want to hear the one sermon, not join the whole god damned church!

The cornerstone that’s missing from this crumbling edifice is a low-or-no-fee payment system that would allow me to send the publication a micropayment for the privilege of reading what I’m seeing and nothing else. Would I pay a nickel to read the rest of that story? Sure. How about a dime? Oh, I suppose.

Bitcoin comes to mind, but it lacks the needed immediacy. I need to be able to click a button, the payment gets processed in milliseconds, and I keep on reading. Maybe somebody will come up with some other blockchain system that would act as a third-party micropayment system all publications could plug into.

Then, instead of paying good money in advance for the pig-in-a-poke the media publishers represent, I can add $10 or $20 to my deposit account when I get a robo-email telling me it’s getting low from having read items that were actually interesting or valuable.