The New York Times’ expanded paywall offerings are off to a poor start, and its three-year run of higher circulation revenue may be at an end.

The Times’ digital-subscription strategy has been a huge success since it launched in March 2011, tallying 799,000 subscribers by the end of last month. But the high growth rates for the $195-a-year product, which have saved the paper’s bacon, were leveling off, while print circulation continued to dwindle and digital ads went backward. The Times needed a new source of growth.

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Readers of the New York TimesNYT -4.50% are spending roughly the same amount of time on advertiser-sponsored posts as on news stories, according to Meredith Levien, the executive vice president of advertising for The Times.

While the post appeared under Schwencke’s byline, the real author was an algorithm called Quakebot that he developed a little over two years ago. Whenever an alert comes in from the U.S. Geological Survey about an earthquake above a certain size threshold, Quakebot is programmed to extract the relevant data from the USGS report and plug it into a pre-written template. The story goes into the LAT’s content management system, where it awaits review and publication by a human editor.

The digital currency’s low transaction costs may revive a long-frustrated online content model — the paywall.

Since the mid 1990s, vendors have dreamed of being able to sell music, news, games, and other digital goods online for tiny amounts that would in theory add up to big revenue. But structural barriers including fees from payments processors have stymied the model for nearly two decades, leaving publishers to rely on meager advertising, underperforming subscription models, and expensive centralized stores from Amazon, Apple, and Google.

Low costs and other features are making bitcoin an attractive basis for resurrecting the micropayments idea. Two startups, Bitwall and Coinlock, could help shift consumer activity away from walled gardens like iTunes and toward a less centralized ecosystem in which independent vendors could offer content at micro-prices, ultimately opening up vast new flows of consumer spending online.