A paywall is around an entire site. You have to pay for the whole thing or not at all, and you have you do it separately for every site. Subscriptions to the NYT, WSJ, Economist and the FT would cost a fortune, and I would read a minute fraction of the content. As a result I don't have subscriptions for any of them, and none of them get a penny from me. With a common system, paid with a single click per article, I and many others would happily rack up significant tallies reading individual articles across all these publications. It's a win/win.
I don't buy the argument that people wouldn't be bothered. A popup with a balance, cost for the article and yes/no button would be far less mental effort than I already spend finding how to refuse consent on tracking popups, and about the same effort as required for those that simply click the button to grant consent. If that were too much to expect people to do nobody would be reading any articles in the EU at present.
> Subscriptions to the NYT, WSJ, Economist and the FT would cost a fortune, and I would read a minute fraction of the content. As a result I don't have subscriptions for any of them, and none of them get a penny from me.
I would question whether that is actually the economically rational choice. Even if you read only a fraction of the content, the value you receive from the fraction you do read may still justify the cost. You probably only watch a fraction of all videos on Netflix yet still don't mind paying for it.
Also, there is a positive value in supporting a journalistic institution because you also derive benefit from other people reading their articles because it means you get to live in a better-informed world.
Either way...
> With a common system, paid with a single click per article, I and many others would happily rack up significant tallies reading individual articles across all these publications. It's a win/win.
Now you're talking micropayments[0]. People have also been trying those startups since the 90s. They have basically all failed. There is Twitch Bits, I guess, but I don't know how often that's used or whether I'd call the kinds of content that Twitch's structure incentivizes to be a good thing.
Not all problems can be solved with technology. Or, at least, with technology that only works if you assume that humans are rationally economical spherical actors in a vacuum.
I don't buy the argument that people wouldn't be bothered. A popup with a balance, cost for the article and yes/no button would be far less mental effort than I already spend finding how to refuse consent on tracking popups, and about the same effort as required for those that simply click the button to grant consent. If that were too much to expect people to do nobody would be reading any articles in the EU at present.