The idea of variable subscription models is interesting, especially if the consumer can see detailed justifications for their bill. I think that's a key point in battling subscription fatigue.
Software companies water down their financial models to a very simplistic bill, partly because there's no way of (easily) variably billing consumers of their software, but also because it's easy to understand.
I know that if I received an easily digestible bill of my monthly Spotify usage, and was charged more than what I'm currently paying for on my fixed plan, I'd be ok with it. I also know that if I'm not using Spotify as much for a specific month, and was charged less than what I normally pay for it, I'd also be very ok with it!
-- Search engines clobbering "portals". -- The huge subscription market for Bloomberg, et al. (In its early years, Bloomberg consistently offered more information than its competitors.) -- ASCAP. -- Netflix. -- Kindle Unlimited.
More limited subscriptions can of course succeed if their value propositions are sufficiently simple and compelling. For example: -- Pre-internet, business newsletters and almanacs had a good market, especially if they had valuable and unique raw information. -- Pre-internet, the only categories of consumer newsletter that had good markets were in investments and health. In both those cases, the value proposition is pretty clear. -- Our household subscribes to HBO almost solely for Game of Thrones.
He's ok with subscriptions. However, his particular statement is in context of subscriptions interfering with providing free content.
As far as I can tell, if we want to have websites provide "free" content we have the following choices to that puzzle:
1) sponsored by advertisers
2) sponsored by government taxes (e.g. collect a new "web usage tax" from citizens to fund a CitizenBook as free alternative to Facebook ads and PublicNewsTimes as free alternative to New York Times paid subscription. I doubt that enough voters would support such a tax just to avoid ads.)
3) blockchain? cryptocurrency? (Not sure what Fred has seen with this option.)
My hypothesis is subscriptions, for news at least, are all-or-nothing propositions. But in a world where there's so much content, much of it for free, we will only want to bypass a paywall for a given site occasionally when we encounter it.
Why hasn't someone built a variable subscription model that is geared to one's reading habits?