Brill, among the media industry's more colorful entrepreneurs, has been laying the groundwork for today's announcement for some time. Last month he stepped down from his job running the fast-pass company; in February he floated a not-so-"confidential" memo urging the New York Times to resume charging for internet content.

Now he's launched Journalism Online Inc., whose goal is to make it easy for technologically-challenged newspaper companies to sell online subscriptions and individual stories. The company, which Brill co-founded with former Wall Street Journal publisher L. Gordon Crovitz and former telecom executive Leo Hindery Jr.,hopes to sell simple software to implement content payment schemes, while allowing consumers to create a single account, usable across all Journalism Online-affiliated publications.

Brill told the Times:

"Much of the barrier to charging online is the transaction friction, as opposed to the actual cost. With this system, you'd have a single password, give your credit number just once."

Trouble is, people with much more tech and retail cred than Brill already offer ways to do the same thing. PayPal and Amazon both offer micropayments interfaces to programmers, as we've noted before. Amazon's sophisticated system can be easily customized, but can also be implemented as simply as including an HTML snippet on a Web page.

Brill has no prayer of competing with either Amazon or PayPal when it comes to scalability, fraud protection, or number of existing accounts. Like countless consultants and software companies before him, Brill's only hope is to convince old-school newspaper publishers they're better off buying overpriced content management "solutions" than building simple, reliable websites using off-the-shelf technology and in-house programming.

Given that newspapers publishers' single biggest Web idea this year has been to recycle the very old "let's charge for content" meme, he's probably on to something.

In Time's latest cover story — which you can read without charge on the World Wide Web — Isaacson writes that publications cannot rely on advertising revenues alone, and should get their readers to pay per article instead:

A person who wants one day's edition of a newspaper or is enticed by a link to an interesting article is rarely going to go through the cost and hassle of signing up for a subscription under today's clunky payment systems. The key to attracting online revenue, I think, is to come up with an iTunes-easy method of micropayment.

We ought to cheer the notion that publications will try to start charging for content online. Writers at ad-supported publications will pay the fees and deliver crisp summaries and analysis for free. Outlets which charge will end up reduced to the business of trade publications, which only manage to extract money from people who need the information for their job.

That's pretty much what Time did in its early years, when it was a fancy printed blog. Editors there subscribed to the New York Times and other papers, and wrote up a weekly digest, which Time's founder, Henry Luce, then sold for rather less money than one would pay at the newsstand for all their sources.

But we have to wonder where Isaacson got this idea? Here's a hint: In 1995, Josh Quittner, whom Isaacson had hired the year before, wrote an essay about "Way New Journalism" for the online arm of Wired. Quittner wrote:

Nearly two-thirds of the cost of putting out a newspaper or magazine is the cost of printing it (paper, ink, printing presses) and distributing it (trucks, delivery folks, mail). Uncouple the content from the production and distribution costs, and you see the kind of cash we're dealing with here. Introduce the possibility that by the end of the decade, 100 million people will be on the Net. Now, give those people the technical ability to pay 3 cents for each and every story they read. If only 1 million people read, say, one Time story on O.J. Simpson, that's US$30,000. Pretty soon, you're talking about real money.

When Quittner noted that the technical infrastructure for such micropayments was missing in 1995, it was true. When Wired repeated the claim a year later, it was still true. But when Isaacson mouths the verity in 2009, he makes a fool of himself. He writes that PayPal does not accept micropayments; in fact, it does. Amazon.com lets anyone build their own micropayments service using its billing engine. The existence of 99-cent iTunes songs and 10-cent text messages show that consumers are willing to pay small amounts for digital content.

The problem with micropayments is not technology. It's that consumers are fundamentally uninterested in paying per article. Isaacson dismisses the problem of "mental transaction costs," but it's quite real. It's almost impossible to determine the value of an article before you read it. And the amounts we're talking about — 3 cents? 5 cents? 10 cents? — aren't worth the time it takes to decide how much one is willing to pay.

The advocates of micropayments also forget the basic law of supply and demand. Editors today increasingly talk about "commodity news" — the numbingly same mass of articles written about the same news event, adding nothing to the reader's knowledge. Why would anyone pay for those? The snobs of print media also forget that they have long competed with free radio and television news broadcasts. The news will come out, one way or another. It's the classic vanity of writers to think that they have created the one perfect story that exceeds all others. The clear-minded statistics of Web usage quickly reveal this as a delusion.

Quittner (who, full disclosure, was my boss for six years at Time and Business 2.0 and talked about micopayments incessantly) was right to note the liberating effect of getting rid of the costs of print media. But he was wrong about how we'd pay for it.

Despite this, saavy content providers should be able to find content that users do value. The comedy site Something Awful charges $10 — not for its videos, but to register on its forums. Since its community is, for reasons that escape us, viewed as a valuable resource, 100,000 people have succumbed to the toll. One could argue that the charge also discourages the more obnoxious users from posting in the forums, increasing their value. Even so, Something Awful continues to milk revenue from users by charging incremental fees to unlock further options — search, archive access, custom titles, and so on.

With the release of Microsoft's Xbox 360, the videogame division has popularized the idea of "microtransactions." It's a common practice to extend the life of videogames by releasing new campaigns or maps. Originally such content was free, but now the Xbox Marketplace charges between $5 and $10 per expansion. There was an initial outcry from the community, but now they stomach the charge, as long as the expansion's reasonably entertaining.

There are now even entire games that take this model to the extreme. Some massively multiplayer online games don't charge a subscription fee, the traditional way for making money. Instead, the game is given away for free, and money's made as users play. Three Ring's Puzzle Pirates charges for item sales within the game. Each purchase, whether it's in-game currency or a fancy new virtual hat, is only a fraction of what an ordinary game subscription would cost.

As Mitchell points out, micropayments are more successful when introduced to "closed loop systems" like iTunes. But as the idea of micropayments branches out from the videogame and multimedia worlds, content providers should find ways to adopt micropayments as a way to avoid driving away consumers with large upfront subscription fees. The provided service just has to offer a value-added service that most users wouldn't expect for free. Sadly, that's not likely to be yet another text article on the Web. (Photo by Eek the Cat)

This is huge news for artists, writers, coders, and other small or individual merchants, especially those who'll profit from being able to sell little things for cheap. Nobody would pay $5 for a neat poem I wrote (you can get a book of poems for that!), but they might pay $0.50 to download a .pdf or $1.50 for a signed print.

You can take payments of as little as $1.00 on PayPal, but of course with PayPal you have to give them access to your bank account, and with Google, not so.

Google Checkout continues its relentless pursuit of excellence/Paypal smashing. Why haven't we bought shares in yet? Oh wait, because it's expensive, has low cash flow, and Google keeps issuing stock to employees.

Aside: Google Checkout's promotional $10 off $30+ and $20 off $50+ program ended today. — BEN POPKEN

Google Checkout Does Micropayments! [*The *Transcendental *Wildcard]