[prepend]

This is not a viable model. First paying $1 to read an article that might or might not be good is not something I’m into and something that would result in lots of spam and SEO if customers actually did that. So $1 for 2 months of WSJ and the 75 other sites linked to from here is not something I can afford.

Second, the mental fatigue from signing up and putting up with their spam for the rest of my life makes me sad just to imagine. Having a business relationship with hundreds of sites is complicated and not fun to manage.

If there was a way to pay a penny and then maybe 10 cents if I like it, I would gladly do it. But publishers value their content higher than that.

Flattr has a good idea where they would divide up your monthly media budget across publishers, but that didn’t take off. Brace Browser is similar.

I think the biggest issue is that I don’t trust publishers because all my interactions with them are unpleasant (eg, intrusive ads, spam, AstroTurf, etc).

The only real action I can take is to Adblock/corcumvent paywalls. That’s something I can do. Hopefully publishers will adjust models and stay in business. But if every paywall site goes out of business, I’m ok with that as well. I think the world would be net better off if we only had BBC/NPR/etc. definitely some downsides, but a net positive.