New York Times Redesign

And that's precisely what you've got now, except that the paying authority is advertisers, with access mediated by whatever roadblocks Google's thrown at SEO this week. In earlier schemes, you got the content preferred by patrons (royalty and/or the Church), or what could support small roving troups of actors, players, musicians, bards, raconteurs, etc. Back in the 1980s I was watching an early "festival of computer animation" and noticed that shorts from cigarette advertisments (largely from Europe) featured heavily. It was, effectively, the Church for patronage of CGI development (nascent and expensive at the time).

The syndication need not be through a single agency, and there are existing examples in the music industry (not that that's perfect either): you've got The Harry Fox Agency, ASCAP, SESAC, and BMI. For airtime play there is both logs (of airplay) and sampling methods to determine who gets paid for what. The licensing even covers live performance venues such as bars and nightclubs. There it's the club owner, not the band, who has the license for performances (it's much easier to conduct audits and enforcement against a street address than with a band whose location isn't fixed, has few assets, and can scatter to the winds).

The other question is how to link receipt and payment. In many locations, Internet access is sufficiently concentrated (often monopolized) that tying major providers into the scheme might work. Access bundles could be tied to your Internet subscription, possibly with tiers of service or credits available for content. This removes the problem of subscribing individually to different source publishers, though it could drive up the cost of Internet access.

Another approach would require more government involvement, essentially an income- or wealth-indexed content tax (addressing the "ability to pay" scenario). Collections are based on payment ability, _distribution_ is based on actual access and utilization.

There are a lot of thorny details, and the question of whether or not there's a process path from the present system to something resembling what I'm suggesting is very much unsettled.

Using my preferred reference for economic data, xkcd's "Money" chart, the total size of the US arts and entertainment industry is $528 billion, where the publishing industry is $152 billion. Estimating online access as, say, 20% of this (which I freely admit was pulled from /dev/ass), works out to about $100 per person annually, which isn't too outrageous a number. Reality might scale up or down from this a ways.