[klingebeil]

News media does not operate at the scale of Netflix or Spotify, etc. Spotify has about 87 million paying users, Netflix around 150 million. The New York Times has around 4 million. That‘s a huge difference in scale alone. And the NYT is the exception, not the rule.

Journalism is expensive. Really expensive, if you want quality. More so, if you want some great investigative reporting.

So, yes subscriptions are mostly structured around the needs of the media company, not the needs of the consumer. No one is assuming, the "internet" is different. The economics of journalism just don‘t care.

[nine_k]

One tiny detail.

If payment options are not convenient to the customers, fewer customers will agree to pay. Maybe too few for the whole thing to be sustainable.