OK, this is a pet peeve, not really tied to today’s news. We often hear the sad stories of how badly the traditional print media are doing and how poorly the paywall strategies are performing for most of them. I get several emails a day from sites wanting me to commit to $50/year, $100/year or whatever at a site where I might read 3 articles a year. No, I’m not going to do that.
It seems to me the solution is obvious. A professional pundit might be willing to spend $1000/year on subscriptions with 25 publishers. Most people will not do that. But many people would be perfectly happy to pay a few cents for each article they view if they didn’t have to manage 25 different subscriptions.
This seems so obvious that it irritates me more and more every day. Why is there not a global pay-per-view service on the Internet that publishers could participate with? Publishers could provide the article summary for free and when I want to read beyond the summary, there would be an approval box for me to agree to charge my account a few cents — even 10 or 20 cents for a really weighty article that represents lots of research. The service would aggregate all those article accesses and charge my credit card once per month. I would have only one subscription to manage, and that would also provide me a history of what I have accessed, allowing me to go back to those articles for free.
If I wanted to pass the article along to my friends, either they could pay from their own accounts or I could have the option of paying for them, perhaps specifying a not-to-exceed budget of $2 for all the access to the article I referred.
This all seems to obvious and relatively simple compared to many other services that are available on the Internet today. It boggles the mind that the major publishers have not already come together to collaborate on this. What am I missing here?