[hombre_fatal]

If "their day comes" and we still don't have a cultural shift that involves paying anyone for content except the largest tech companies (e.g. Netflix), then we'll be even worse off.

Though, that Patreon has any traction at all suggests that a shift is happening or at least becoming feasible.

[welly]

I'm not sure what the alternative is. You can pick up a newspaper for 20p,or a "quality" newspaper for 50p (UK rates). Would I pay 50p a day to browse a news site? At the moment, no, because I can get my news for free elsewhere, with similar political alignment. I feel like I would pay something for really, really good curation and aggregation of news I'm interested in. But not all the time.

It seems subscription is the only alternative to free and I don't want endless subscriptions to news (be it tech news or what's going on in the world). Because it all adds up. I want to be able to buy stories/news etc. ad hoc as I do/did a newspaper rather than being committed to a month subscription where I may not take advantage of it all the time.

Spotify is an example of a service I use frequently but probably don't use it every day and as such I sometimes unsubscribe from it. I'd love to be able to subscribe to it when I'm using it. Say 25p/30c a day (or less ideally).

Sure it may end up coming out costing me more than a monthly subscription but some months it wouldn't because I don't use it all the time.

I'm all for paying for content but all these subscriptions add up.

AWS has got it figured out, to a degree - more so than media companies. Charge for usage.