Musk says to roll out per-article payment plan on Twitter

Elon Musk on Saturday announced a plan for his Twitter platform to allow media publishers to charge users on a per-article basis with a single click.

“This enables users who would not sign up for a monthly subscription to pay a higher per article price for when they want to read an occasional article,” the billionaire entrepreneur said on Twitter, adding, “Should be a major win-win for both media orgs & the public.”

He said the plan would begin next month, but provided no details on exact pricing or what cut Twitter would take.

The announcement came as Musk has been struggling, amid frequent controversy, to make Twitter profitable.

Media organizations have wrestled for years with how to formulate subscription plans that pay their operating costs even as readers have grown accustomed to getting news free on the internet.

The Musk plan raises questions about how exactly he hopes to make the micro-payment approach work when others have failed.

British journalist James Ball listed several problems with micro-payment -- an idea, he wrote in the Columbia Journalism Review, that has “definitely occurred to major publishers across the planet.”