How do you think they should finance their operations?

Honest question. If you have something brilliant there's obviously a market opportunity here.

Are there any sites experimenting with micro payments? I don't really want another recurring monthly subscription, but I might be willing to pay 1-5 cents for each article beyond the 10 monthly freebies, if they could figure out a way to make the payment method frictionless enough.

Turns out you and me are on the same page. Ever since I heard of the concept of micropayments I've felt they were the way forward. Unfortunately, I feel that until somebody with the perseverance of the Collison brothers shows up to hack through the legal schlep, a usable micropayment processor that does real micropayments (I could pull out a quote from Theodore Nelson here about fractions of a cent, but I won't bother.) won't materialize.

I think it'd be quite a market for easy integration of an internet-wide micropayment system using BitCoin, if BitCoin continues its growth and acceptance. Seems like a really good fit.

Bitcoin is entirely unsuited to micropayments because it takes a long time to verify it (~20 minutes, rather then <1 second) and it's already having issues with the ballooning size of the blockchain. Putting another few million transactions a day through it will make it completely unsustainable.

That's a good point, I remember seeing an article on the impact Satoshi Dice has had on the blockchain. A shame really.

The Honolulu Civil Beat, the primary news site run by Greenwald's new boss/funder Pierre Omidyar, is subscription based. http://m.civilbeat.com/info/membership/

Sure, but then articles from there wouldn't end up on HN because they wouldn't be public. The NYT wants to have their cake and eat it too.

The NSFWcorp method of letting a subscriber temporarily unlock an article seems like a good compromise. I'm certainly much closer to subscribing than if I'd never read any articles.

I concur. I've seen that work well especially for community oriented titles (LWN does this, I seem to recall, as does the Practicing Ruby journal).

Yes, damn that content creator wanting to try and charge you for their content!

open in incognito window (cmd+shift+n)... yeesh.

That's a good tip, I hadn't thought of that.