I'm sure that the NYT would love this setup. On the other hand, they're having a hard enough sell getting people to sign up for _free_.<p>I simply don't believe that people mentally give the average article any value significantly above zero. Sure, I would pay .04 for a great op-ed article or for a quality book review that I'm interested in, but I really don't think the average story at the NYT is that much better than I can read on a dozen blogs for free.
It does not address the problem number one with micropayments - that there is a mental cost for any money transaction and if you are really talking about micro payments then this mental cost can easily dominate the cost of the whole transaction.