Personally just fucking let me pay $1 per article for me to read. I will NEVER subscribe to a recurring thing, but i bet you I'll start paying a lot, as I want to read many articles per month.
Paywall sure, but get the fucking subscription the hell away from me.
To be honest, just give me the price you charge advertisers to advertise to me and let me read it with no advertisements. I'd be immensely satisfied with that solution, but no way in hell am I paying $15-$30/month for every single separately affiliated site. It's ridiculous honestly when they're otherwise perfectly happy to serve me ads instead for a fraction of that price.
As Benedict Evans put it, when France fined Google for the same reasons:
> The shakedown continues. It’s hard to see how making tech companies pretend to ‘buy’ something that has little to no economic value to them is a path to a sustainable model for newspapers. If you want a tax and a subsidy, be honest and call it that.
https://twitter.com/benedictevans/status/1414856375348482050
Yes: fast, easy, and safe. But those are implementation details, and solvable ones.
But seems to me they're not onboard with any of it. They want an account, and a bunch of BS.
I was once so tempted that i was FIVE screens into one paper's registration process when I went "fuck this" and closed the tab. Apparently they don't want my money.