Your critique of the “one-price-fits-all” approach to micropayments is spot on. Fortunately, the “one-price-fits-all” approach isn’t the only approach. The approach you didn’t critique was the “pay-what-you-want” (PWYW) approach to micropayments.

Here’s a story that I just read on Medium… Why I don’t advocate for a planned political economy. I really enjoyed the story. So if there had been some “one click giving” coin buttons at the end of the story, like so…

… then I would have clicked the quarter button at least twice.

In this picture I’ve used Youtube as an example. The $3.50 is how much I’ve allocated to this song and the $250.01 is how much the crowd has allocated to it. Needless to say I’ve listened to the song a few times!

In terms of logistics… I’d simply use paypal to deposit money into my Medium “wallet”. If I valued your story at a penny, then I’d click the penny button and a penny would be transferred from my Medium Wallet (MW) into your MW. Once you had enough pennies in your MW, you could request a withdrawal. Medium would take its cut and pass the rest on to you.

If Medium was too greedy, then there would be a gazillion other websites for you to share your stories on. In essence, the PWYW micropayment approach would turn Medium, and a gazillion other websites, into markets. And no two markets would be equally beneficial.

Some markets, such as the Washington Post, would use, at least initially, the subscription + PWYW micropayment approach. Subscribers would put $100 per year into their Washington Post Wallet (WPW)… but they would be able to allocate their pennies, all 10,000 of them, however they wanted among the various articles. Of course they wouldn’t be required to. It would be entirely optional. But once valuing a story is as easy as liking it… then I’m sure everybody’s going to do so.