[bobro]

>That model is completely counter-intuitive and punitive to the consumer.

I disagree with this so much. Paying for a thing once and getting the thing is absolutely intuitive. Subscription models where you pay generally for access over a time period to a broad swath of things is counter-intuitive. I want to read a handful of articles from NYT a month. I will never sign up for a subscription for that, so I just don’t really get to read NYT articles. I’m sure there is an amount I could agree to pay for an article.

[servo_sausage]

The problem is consistency, or maybe discovery...

If I see a link to an article, or get it as a search result, I have no real way to see the quality of what I'm buying.

With a subscription the assumption is the quality is consistent over time.

[subpixel]

In reality every article worth reading is available for free, using certain urls. So I’m not so much refusing to pay for url access as much as I am deciding to pay for publication and app access.