[joanofarf]

Sort of Spotify for written content.

Wouldn't this end up leaving even more money on the table? Spotify pays artists based on their share of total plays.

Say two sites (X and Y) join up to offer a $10/month pass for unlimited access to both sites, with the say pay scheme as Spotify. Site X has 3 times as many articles/videos as Site Y. If every user reads/watches 100% of Site Y's content, Site X may still receive an equal or larger share of the payouts even though users consumed a much lower percentage of it.

[cmsmith]

If you make the assumption that each piece of 'content' takes the same amount of effort/money to produce, that's not really a problem. Site X has presumably spent 3 times as much on content creation, so it's fine for them to get 3 times the revenue (assuming equal quality).

The problem I see is that with spotify it's pretty easy to determine the rate of content consumption (e.g. songs or minutes listened). News sites are pretty adept at turning one piece of content into many (multi-page articles or slideshows), and the system would have to protect against that.

[TylerE]

Another option might be to proportion revenue in accordance with membership sources into the cartel. E.g. if site 1 delivers 10 new subscribers, and site 2 brings in 2 new subscribers, the money goes to the sites in a 5:1 ratio, minus maybe 10% off the top for operating expenses.

[TylerE]

I don't know - but I suspect some reasonably equitable scheme could be figured.