Most people won't pay for a subscription and most times the content is too sparse to organize as one despite providing some value (e.g. niche blogs).

I've 2 niche blogs and tried several ways of monetisation along the years. I only kept a direct ad (that adblocks can't detect) and amazon affiliates. I ditched Adsense (from 50€ it dropped to 1€/month) and tried donations (patreon, buymeacoffee, paypal) but it's not the right niche for that (art students).

You hit the right point: sparse content is the enemy of the subscription.

If you keep your content focused/niche enough I think overtime you should have a nice following.

I would love to discuss the problems with your two blogs, I'm actually trying to solve them.

Subscription only makes sense when the content is concentrated in 1-2 paid-for aggregators -- or if there's a single convenient way to pay for everything.

Not sure why we haven't added some such one-click "pay $0.2 for this article/video/etc" option to our web browsers. That was the whole promise of micropayments back in the day.

Yes, universal subscriptions, based on capacity to pay. Or as is commonly referred: a tax.

Subscription decouples the reward for quality from the consumer. A good system would create payment by time && Lines Read minus some Rewared for Content produced as Result by the User (Not emotional Engagment drivel in some comment, but actually contributing to a discussion).

Good Content would be peer reviewed by its readers, like it happens here on HN, and those reviews would in return garant those contributing some discount or even reward.

We are so far away from that like earth from mars.

Wouldn't it be the other way around? The subscription explicitly ties the reward to the quality.

Imagine this: (1) The publisher starts writing quality content in order to gather as much subscribers as possible. (2) Th publisher gets a comfortable amount of subscribers. So it starts to wind down the content quality, thus reducing his costs. (3) Now the users aren't getting the quality they are paying for. (4) Maybe slowly, but surely the subscribers will cancel their subscriptions and ultimately lose their trust in the publication itself. (5) The world is balanced once again.

Now this last point is important, the relationship between the producer and the consumer is based on trust.