Blendle (https://blendle.com) is a news aggregator where you pay per article that you decide to read. Price ranges from ~20 cents for a fluff opinion piece to ~90 cents for quality journalism. It’s just for the Netherlands and possibly Germany (?) atm but they are working towards a US launch.
This is a pretty good model I think. It’s accessible and sustainable for both publishers and readers.
My problem with Blendle is that you're essentially paying for them to get a full profile of every article your read. At least Google Analytics and such can be blocked, making it more difficult to connect your profile across the sites of different publications. With Blendle, that's impossible.
I know it's adding complexity and most people don't care, but I wish they used a system of crypto vouchers (not like cryptocurrencies, more like Mozilla Persona, which allowed identity providers - in this case, Blendle - to vouch for the user without knowing to whom they were vouching).
Why doesn’t it scale? People used to have to pay for access to all of these articles (and still do BTW). It’s actually become way cheaper to read a wide variety of sources.
I don't consume things that I'm required to pay for and then don't pay for. So no on the entitled issue.
Paid journalism (by the consumer) is getting harder and harder. Do you have a good example of journalism today that is paid for by the consumer (i.e. monetarily) that is good journalism?
(And I consume a wide variety of sources to specifically try to pick up on bias, and oh boy!)
Brave browser has a micropayment system. I would like to see this succeed. I'm happy to pay a little cash for content, just not in the form of malware and irritation.
This is a pretty good model I think. It’s accessible and sustainable for both publishers and readers.