Ever since the early days of the World Wide Web, people have talked about making individual news stories available for very small amounts of money. The so-called micro-payments idea never took off because it is both a technical nightmare and something the news providers would rather not deal with. They favor annual subscriptions.

But a Dutch company called Blendle has persuaded the vast majority of Dutch publishers to sign up to sell individual articles on its website for as little as 10 eurocents, according to a report in the Financial Times. Publishers that have signed up included De Persgroup, Sanoma, Hearst and Reed Elsevier. The website is scheduled to begin operations in April.

Dutch publishers have kept most of their best content behind subscription paywalls, and Blendle wants to prove that there is money to be made by selling news stories on a one-off basis. The publishers can set their own prices for articles, and Blendle will take a 30% cut for its trouble.

Sounds like the original idea behind iTunes from Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) doesn’t it? The music industry wanted to sell pricey CDs and figured that iTunes would not amount to much new revenue. The music mavens did not get that one right. CD sales have never again reached pre-iTunes levels and revenues never recovered either. The Dutch publishers may face the same problem.

This sort of program may not work well in other countries, like the United Kingdom, where most news content from newspapers and the BBC is available free, or the United States, where major news sources have either successfully migrated to a subscription model or always had one.

The issue is not whether the free content from many U.K. or U.S. publishers has value. It is instead whether consumers who are now used to so much good content for free will be willing to pay even a tiny price for a single news story.

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