[commentzorro]

I respectfully disagree with you.

Most larger websites produce two or three articles a month that I'm interested in. Smaller websites may only produce one or two articles a year that I'm interested in reading. There is no way I'm going to sign up for 100+ websites in order to read sporadic content. But this sporadic content is what does exist and needs to exist in order to get a well rounded web. So it's not realistic to say to a smaller niche blog to produce "better" and more frequent content that appeals to everyone. That's part of the beauty of thousands of niche web sites over, for example, dozens of niche magazines of the past.

So, there is a fundamental problem that needs to be addressed. There needs to be a way to aggregate all these sites into a single payment system. You pay for a year and get access to the sites you like. Then this payment processing company takes care of allocating the money based on various factors like how many people access each article.

Finally, in order to maximize revenue to content providers, this company should be setup not to take a fixed percent of each transaction but only take what it needs to sustain itself. In other words, at the end of each week/month/whatever the company totals up it's expenses and take their percentage only up sustainability (which includes growth factors). No more middle man leaches!

[teddyh]

Such a “well rounded web” has no inherent right to exist. If it is at the cost of having ads, and that cost is too high, then we won’t get it. And that would be fine with me. I remember the Internet before the web. I can easily imagine an Internet without it.

[aDevilInMe]

"I respectfully disagree with you."

And yet you do not, instead you propose a system in which people pay for content.

[commentzorro]

The part I disagree with is the "no one is willing to pay for" part. Should have made that clearer.

I contend that lots of people are willing to pay, just not by the current means. (And proposed a possible solution that would suit me, and what I naively believe to be others too.)