[infogulch]

I hoped a flattr-like solution would work, but it would need to be more automatic.

How much is all the longform article content you consume in a month worth to you? $5/mo? 20? 100? Take that, and split it up between all the sites you read news from. Multiply by 100k readers, boom! viable business model. Now the question is how you split it up. It needs to be thoughtless and as fine-grained as possible: maybe number of articles read or minutes spent reading.

This keeps the open internet: sites still compete on merit not on the inertia of subscription since the money follows the user's reading habits closely.