Telegraph.co.uk reports the UK’s main commercial free-to-air TV broadcaster has delayed a programme under which it wants to charge online viewers for some content. But that’s not quite the case.

News International’s The Times may shed its social media invisibility cloak by letting subscribers gift paywalled articles to friends.

TinyPass, a startup that aims to streamline the process of charging for content online by using existing platforms like Google (NSDQ: GOOG) and PayPal, has signed its first four publishers: DJ Booth, Hedge Tracker, Seattleite and Accent Pro.

The combined digital kiosk of eight French newspapers is adopting Google’s OnePass to facilitate all its customer payments beside iOS.

Google Wallet officially launched this week with payment partners Citi and MasterCard on board and three other credit card networks (Visa, Discover and American Express) waiting in the wings. Version 1.0 is pretty much what Google (NSDQ: GOOG) said it would be when it announced the service last May.

BBC Worldwide is make episodes of Top Gear available to Facebook users at a cost of 93p. The BBC’s commercial arm has developed a video-on-demand app for Facebook that will allow users of the website to rent a limited number of Top Gear episodes using Facebook Credits.

German news publisher Axel Springer, whose own paid consumer content initiative launched before News Corp.‘s, has reported what it says are some promising figures…

Imagine a future in which Facebook, because it’s amassed a massive network of people engaging with entertainment brands, becomes the payment platform of choice for those interactions.

The early contender for the all-hype-no-action award so far in 2011 has been mobile payments, and while it still won’t be available until later this year, Google (NSDQ: GOOG) at least laid out a plausible plan Thursday for how we’ll soon be able to buy overpriced smoothies with our phones. …

The New York Times’ share of total page views to newspaper websites dropped by its largest margin in more than a year in April, the first full month that it had its paywall up. ComScore (NSDQ: SCOR) data shows that the NYT‘s share of newspaper website traffic was 10.6 percent…

Calvin Young and his partner Noah Ready-Campbell (pictured at left) left Google (NSDQ: GOOG) two months ago to start Minno, a company dedicated to reviving the idea of micropayments as a way to monetize content on the web. This weekend, the two men hatched a plan to grab some much-needed…

ProPublica is going public today as the latest customer of Press+, the payment platform from Journalism Online.The investigative nonprofit is the most high-profile addition so far from a recent grant by The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation designed to encourage its grantees to try new methods of raising…

Lots of about next-generation payment platforms today, and it’s only beginning to ramp up. Most of the news surrounded PayPal’s developer conference today in San Francisco and its three designated themes: local, social and mobile. PayPal said today it is launching a new digital goods payment platform that will make…

The New York Times Co. (NYSE: NYT) is suing micropayments system Kachingle after the service maintained several of the flagship newspaper’s blogs without permission. But as the Trademark Blog points out, the suit is not over copyright infringement. Instead, the NYTCo is accusing Mountain View-based Kachingle of violating its trademarks.…

Yet another micro-transactions and payment platform has raised a significant wad of money. This time it is PlaySpan, which has received $18 million in a third round from Vodafone (NYSE: VOD) Ventures and Softbank Bodhi Fund, and existing investors Menlo Ventures, Novel TMT Ventures, STIC, and others. The Santa Clara,…

PayPal is set to launch a new product specifically designed to facilitate micropayments—a move that could set it up as a more attractive option for publications looking to charge for content online. PayPal President Scott Thompson tells the Associated Press that the new product will likely launch by the end…

The New York Times, which is set to put up an online paywall early next year, is now surveying readers to determine how they would react when a screen popped up asking them to pay up after they had exceeded their “quota of free articles” for the month.

GlobalPost, the international news startup which has tried to establish “elite paid memberships” as a significant revenue stream—with only limited success—is trying to turn that around by changing the structure of its so-called Passport Service. GlobalPost, which currently charges Passport members $49.95 a year for access to exclusive content, as…

... Zero. Yes, zero, according to a study by the Center for the Digital Future at the University of Southern California Annenberg School For Communication And Journalism. We already know thanks to several other surveys that consumers aren’t exactly rushing to pay for social networking online, but the Annenberg School’s…