[Animats]

No, just the general failure of the pay-to-read model. Other than the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Economist, few general publications with a paywall make money. They all have large, worldwide reporting staffs. Nobody is going to pay to read your blog.

Pando Daily is trying pay-to-read. It's too soon to tell how that will work out.

[michaelchisari]

The NYT/WSJ/Economist model is too exclusionary and the pricing isn't ideal.

I'm watching Blendle closely, because their model of micropayments for news content, mixed with no-questions-asked refunds I think could be huge.

[scholia]

Text is a rather small part of web traffic. Most bandwidth nowadays is used to deliver multimedia content (music and movies), much of it in real time.

Several people have written articles about how the Internet has been and is being changed to work as a more efficient video distribution network, which is a long way from the original idea.....

Some of that is paid for by subscriptions (eg Netflix, Spotify) though I assume the vast majority is -- like most radio and television -- paid for by advertising.