Piano Media wants national paywalls all over Europe

While the headline – 'national paywalls'?!?! – is almost certain to provoke misunderstanding and negative reactions, there's actually something interesting here.

It's a multi-site all-you-can-view subscription, with the revenues partitioned by traffic and success in signing up new users. So it's in the same vein as once-discussed-but-now-gone 'Contenture'.

There needs to be something other than AdSense/display-advertising to support quality online content; simple plans like this could be a help. Though I suspect this service could tend over time to become concentrated into one or a few giant roll-up providers.

To that end, Google has a little-discussed similar offering as well: 'OnePass' http://www.google.com/landing/onepass/