It happens any time the same class of content producers expect to get paid for their content. It gets channeled through brokers, who inevitably end up with the power. People find it annoying to pay 10 people $10 every month; they just want to pay the Content Person $100/mo instead.

In TV land, this is called "cable". Many people apparently do not realize they have re-invented this for websites.

We need a platform that facilitates payments easily and transparently _without_ seeking to bloat itself to extremes. Then content authors and content consumers can still interact more-or-less directly and we won't have the problems that are typical with big content brokers.

Yup, kinda like the massive undertaking Steve Jobs did to make iTunes a reality (getting the content from competing Music Corps.). An 'iNews' seems as much of a Herculean job of convincing competing news outlet to lay out their content piecemeal alongside their competitors content... tough sell!

But I do like the idea and would also gladly pay for it!

Ironically, Apple has something along the lines of what you're describing. It's just not available outside of iOS.

https://www.apple.com/news/

Google has something along these lines that not many folks seem to know about:

https://play.google.com/store/newsstand and https://newsstand.google.com/

Also a task of finding what already exists.