Someone has to pay the content creators or else very little content will be created. What new business model would you propose as an alternative to pay walls? I do pay subscription fees for high quality journalism but most of what's out there is just low-effort slop, churned out to drive tiny bits of advertising revenue.
A universal pay as you consume. That is, one "wallet" with "credits" but many / all sites would be something new.
Or even credits at a solo site level. It's not about time but articles reads (i.e., actual usage).
Also, ending my subscription shouldn't end my access, just access to new content (i.e., content I did not pay for). And maybe the older content gets ads as a supplemental.
My beef with the 20 yr old article is... it's been openly available... and it's 20 yrs old. Now I need to sign in to see it? That's not a paywall. At this point, that's just stupid.
People have been proposing "pay as you consume" systems for decades but no one has ever figured out a sustainable business model. The overhead of accepting and distributing small payments appears to be too high, especially after dealing with fraud and chargebacks.
I don't think it's "no one has ever figured it out". It's more like, doing so would cost consumers less and companies would have less revenue. It's not an unsolvable problem. It's a problem no one - other than consumers - really wants to see solved. It's effectively a wallet. We can't solve the wallet problem? Wait! We have. Plenty of times.
Again, even at the solo site level it's not being done. Certainly, it could be.
Then start a business and do it. If your hypothesis is correct then there are thousands of websites that would love to accept payments from your service.
I think you'll find though that building a wallet is an extraordinary complex problem. The legal compliance issues alone make it tough to build a service that can operate in the USA. As soon as you build a service for transferring money, criminals will immediately try to use it for money laundering and other illegal payments. What's your plan to handle that? You can't just ignore it or most likely the government will shut you down. And those AML/KYC laws are unlikely to be loosened just to suit this use case.
Why? Why would I start a business where there is no market? We've gone over this. It's not a technical and/or solution issue. It's that the gate keepers - the ones who would but the product - don't want something that's good for consumers but bad for them.
> A universal pay as you consume. That is, one "wallet" with "credits" but many / all sites would be something new.
So if i want to read one article from website XYZ, i may need to pay 00001 credits and if I want to read another article from website yyy, i may need to pay 00002 credits?
How would yyy or xyz content creators/journalists actually make a living from this, though?
