Micropayments at the minute, through something like Paypal, would be too fiddly. As Charlie Brooker puts it, newspapers need:

Some simple means of easily “tossing a penny in a cup” for the internet

What about having a sort of subscription-based micropayments system? I’ll try my best to explain what I mean, so here it goes…

Let’s say you want to read the Guardian, Telegraph and The Sun. Except, what you really want is access to CiF, Telegraph news and Sun Sport. So, each publication has its own micropayments system in place. All of the main, daily and weekly publications have an agreement with one outside payments systemy thing like Paypal (excuse my technological ignorance). The consumer signs up to Paypal, inputs all of their card details once, and only once. Then, they have their own accounts for Guardian, Telegraph and The Sun. Each of these accounts will be linked to your Paypal account, perhaps by entering a code on your first sign in. Then, each article would have a one-click button that sends through a payment to Paypal. So, all you have had to do is get a Paypal account once, and sign up to the publications you want to read. Once all the accounts are set up it’s just a case of signing in and clicking once on each article.

In order for that to work, though, all of the main daily and weekly publications would have to put their heads together and sign themselves in a deal with Paypal, whereby they could all use this ‘one-click payment’ system.

One other issue that could arise is it would cost more to process the payment than the payment is actually worth. But you could get around this by totalling it every week and on a set day and at a set time, taking the accumulated amount owed.

There are more than likely several flaws to this, and it’s also probably not very well articulated. But it’s late, so all comments are welcome!