>Why does that prevent it? Because I would need to buy my Bitcoin in "bulk" and the publishers would need to set their price in USD, EUR, GBP or whatever, in order to be able to do proper financial planning.

Given that Bitcoin is as stable as say the USD, someone is going to win or lose money on the conversion between "real" currencies and Bitcoin. I won't be risking money becoming worth less, and neither are the publisher.

I don't know BitPay, but I don't assume that they the risk of devaluation of my Bitcoin for weeks or months. We're not talking about buying just the amount of Bitcoins I need for one article, say 20 cent, because fees attached to the credit card transaction your will want to buy at least a little more.

Agreeable there is a point to be made in the fact that the price of each article is so low that you would only need to buy something like $5 worth of Bitcoin, and at that point it doesn't really matter if you lose %20.

Still I don't feel like Bitcoin is the right option, but maybe it could be the backend to a micro payment system. I just don't want to deal with the Bitcoins or conversion to my local currency.

Can you get the transaction cost to be approx 1 cent, and the latency approx 1s or less?

If not, it's pretty hopeless for this application.

[edit] it's only the user experienced latency that needs to be that low, of course. And you might be able to get away with 10s. But not 100.