Cross market subsidies make this possible once you've killed off all the competition. Therein lies the danger of monopolies.
To be honest, I'm disappointed that no micropayment schemes have taken off yet. I'm perfectly willing to contribute a few pennies to every site that I visit, but there's no good way to do that today. Instead, every time I read an interesting news article that gets forwarded to me by any of a couple of dozen separate paths, I end up at a different news site that I don't have a subscription to. Should I really have to have 100 subscriptions to news sites that I only read 1 or 2 articles from each month? Some entity needs to aggregate this into a single convenient $30/month subscription. Ideally it would be standardised and be added on to my monthly internet bill (IETF standards ftw).
I think there might be psychological issues at play here, sadly. If you click onto a news website from a search engine, and it ends up being for the wrong thing, people feel cheated and will want their money back.
This is probably silly, because if you're paying a couple cents per view, you should be concentrating on the value you receive in the aggregate... but people aren't rational, and personally, I don't think I'd be immune to feeling a sense of regret when I spent money on the wrong link.
I'm not going to remember the episode, but I'm pretty sure Planet Money said this is what happened when micropayments were tried in the 90s.
I subscribe to Scroll.com, and I think they've probably got a better model down. Make agreements with lots of sites from different companies, and then offer a bulk subscription which removes ads from all of them. It doesn't let you through paywalls, mind you, but you could imagine a variation on the concept which did.
Agreed, but there is a "cheap enough" threshold where that doesn't matter. Netflix was like that ~5-6 years ago where there was all kinds of content available. Today I need Netflix + Amazon Prime + Disney+ + who knows what next to get the mix of content that I previously had in that one subscription. I'm at the threshold of no more streaming services now. Fragmentation can destroy markets. Striking a balance between competition and mergers is non-trivial.
A side note: one of the reasons I don't subscribe to more online news sites is that I can't handle changing my credit card number with more vendors than I already do today. I've had 3 card replacements in the past year due to data breaches. This is truly annoying.
Edit: Oh, I see where you're coming from in light of the parent. Well, Google could place ads inside their product without actually running an ad network—that is in fact what most websites on the internet do.
This wouldn't necessarily make sense at Google's scale though, so I don't think that's what GP meant. Rather, Google shouldn't be able to own most of the ad networks on the web while also running massive ad-supported properties in house.
Ad networks were separate years ago! Strangely enough they were acquired. Google bought AdSense and Sprinks in 2003, dMark Broadcasting in 2006, AdScape and DoubleClick in 2007, AdMob in 2009, Invite Media in 2010, mDialog in 2014, Red Hot Labs in 2015... I'm sure there are more.
