| Flaws with this idea: - I don't want 100 different subscriptions. Some newspapers want you to subscribe when you visit them for the first time ever, but beyond an individual news story I have no reason to subscribe to the Tinytown Commercial Appeal & Gazette and am unlikely to ever consult it again. - An amazing amount of paywalled articles are just reprints of wire service stories or rewrites of press releases/ court documents. I am not gonna pay you for what is already public. - What about ads? Yes, I am willing to disable my ad blocker...if you have a reasonable ad policy. If you have more advertising than content, and it's animated or insists on getting in the way of the news outlet's user interface, you are destroying your own product. Don't come at me with 'everyone else does it so we have to as well.' Everyone else does not do it, and if you cared about what you were doing you wouldn't either. I am a poorly paid journalist who gets by on donations, and I don't abuse my readers with ads. Would I like more money, sure. Am I willing to sell my readers time and attention for that, no. I loathe advertising as a consumer and I do not believe that the only viable business models are subscriber lock in or cognitive pollution. |