[m34]

For reference, there's Web Monetization [1] which tries to solve exactly that.

As others have noted it all boils down to user agent support. Otherwise most publishers probably won't consider giving up ad or subscription financed models.

Also, forcing users into subscriptions allows for better demographics data/statistics.

[1] https://webmonetization.org/docs/explainer/

[westurner]

https://webmonetization.org/ lists Coil (flat $5/mo) as the first Web Monetization provider: https://coil.com/

Web Monetization builds upon ILP (Interledger Protocol), which is designed to work with any type of ledger; though it's probably not possible for any traditional ledger to beat the <1¢ transaction fee that only pre-mined coins have been able to achieve.

[viraptor]

I really like their approach and I paid for Flattr for quite a while when it started. But something big needs to push them to the critical adoption rate. On a number of very techy blog posts, I got... 0 from WebMonetization. And that's on best case audience (coming from HN and tech Reddit).