I can only speak for myself, but here is what I would happily pay for: I would happily pay up to 20 cents to read a single article, ad free (or even, I suppose, not ad free), and for perpetual access to that article. And I would happily pay up to 50 bucks a month for all of the articles I read from all publications combined. What I will not do is purchase 20 subscriptions with recurring charges to 20 different media publications, none of which let me read articles from any other publication, and then remember to cancel them and reactivate them on a continuous basis so I can fly through paywalls. What I will also not do is hand over a bunch of personal contact information for the privilege of reading a single article, subjecting myself to all manner of unsolicited marketing emails. I have a feeling I'm not alone.

The sooner we can get to where this is all going, which I believe is tiny, contactless, trust-less, anonymous micropayments on a per-page basis, not a coercive subscription model built on dark patterns like recurring charges and call-to-cancel, the better it will be for everyone . Paywalls and other gating have totally ruined the user experience of the Internet and it is totally orthogonal to how the Internet and its protocols were designed to function. The sooner media realizes that they have to band together to adopt some sort of per-page or per-view micropayments solution in order remain aligned with the content model baked into the web's architecture, the sooner they will figure out how to support their profession with a continuous revenue stream and also, yes, even profit.

And for those who say that will warp the incentives of news reporting: they are already warped by page views and ad revenue. It's self-deluding to think that subscriptions somehow prevent that.