Screw that. I'm not paying for an article before I even know whether it's hacky garbage or actual journalism.

As if the temptation for these sites to pump out clickbait isn't bad enough as it is....

Unless you mean a completely passive option to give them a "tip" so to speak.

In which case I'm not saying it's a bad idea but how is that any different than donating once a year to NPR and PBS during their "Oh-God-Kill-Me-Now-athons." Or in the case of for-profit sites, paying for however many months of subscription fees you feel is appropriate for the value you received.

I guess it could be some honor system "pay when you leave". Or maybe let you review the article "Was this worth 8 cents to you?" and display the votes before you pay so you can decide if it's worth the money. Or maybe you can flag an article as clickbait and get your money back.

Could it be a function of time on page, maybe even with scroll distance. You generally know if the article will be garbage in the first paragraph or two and always before the fold (doubly so before the fold if there wasnt ads taking up the top 75% of the page)

Blendle's 'no questions asked' money-back guarantee works pretty well. You pay the moment you open the article, and if you don't like it you click on the link in the top left to get your money back.

You are looking for https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/

Sounds close, but not quite:

Contributor works on millions of sites and on all of your browsers and devices. Some sites will show fewer ads than others, and often times, a thank you will appear instead of an ad.

If I'm paying, I don't want any ads

Definitely! Nor do I want Google tracking what I'm looking at. Nor do I like the extortion model of, "Well pay us and we won't annoy you."

What about signing up for that and continue blocking the ads?

I personally would rather not pay anything and get an ad, sans tracking, which worked just fine for the content providers of yore.

Does native advertising work?

It just did.

You don't have to if you pay enough.

Basically, it works by having you bid for that ad space. If someone else outbids you, their ad shows.

I'd much rather be denied access to the content if I'm outbid. I'm bidding to view the media, not auctioning my eyeballs. My eyeballs are not for sale, at any price.

Why pay the advertisers? Why not pay publishers directly?

Why not have a single, income-prorated content fee which is then allocated as a quality-and-utilisation pro-rated compensation to information creators?

BBC license fee, but universal and income based, on steroids.

$100/year per person would cover all Internet advertising. $500/year per person would cover all advertising period.

(And that's for major industrialised nations only -- US, EU, Japan, Canada, Australia, roughly).

> If publishers would get together and come up with a single micropayment system ...

I believe this wasn't in reference to advertisers and seems rather similar to your proposal in theory. I'm unsure about the prices that will actually make sense for them to drop advertising completely though...

My fault -- in my original post I mistakenly typed advertisers instead of publishers. I thought I fixed it quickly, but not quickly enough...

Ah, and I suppose I got in too fast.

Yes! That should be like a netflix for content websites or where you could buy credits which works on all major publications and can be spend as you like.

You might be interested in Blendle: http://blendle.com

This looks great. signed up for beta. Thanks:)

I think if it were a Netflix for content websites, I'd pay one low monthly fee to have unlimited views of second rate websites. If I want to read big-name articles, for a bit more money, they'll ship me paper copies of the articles I want to view, but I'd have to return them when I'm done.