I would, if I could make a micropayment for an individual article.

In an environment where everyone consumes just a few articles each from a very large number of sources, it's not reasonable to expect a monthly subscription to a particular source just for the sake of reading one article. I do pay for an online subscription to one newspaper, but I'm not willing to go back to the days of reading only one newspaper.

I might put up with a reasonable amount of advertising, if it didn't track me around the web, attack me with malware, double my bandwidth usage and run scripts that bog down my computer.

and then how much does it cost after the 2 months? and how hard is it to unsubscribe? and how many people subscribe to read a couple of articles then forget about it and end up paying hundreds of dollars in money drained away in drips and drabs in recurring credit card charges?

I like journalism, but it would be really nice to have a better model (I'd even go with pay per article). Subscriptions that you may or may not use have always been a dark pattern, whether it's for journalism or apps or gym memberships.

I'm 100% with you, and I also really would love something better, but I think there are a lot of little issues that still need to be solved (like how micropayments still don't seem to be workable with current credit card systems), and some trust that needs to be built up.

I honestly don't know how it all works with WSJ, but I figured I'd just point out the deal they are having.

It is SUPER hard to unsubscribe, they make you call and jump through hoops.

The model where information is published is going to have to change.

Until it does those who are stuck in the old economic model will suffer.

The concept that you can contain information and retain some value in the distribution of it is obsolete and asking people to pretend that model will still work is silly.

This is not a viable model. First paying $1 to read an article that might or might not be good is not something I’m into and something that would result in lots of spam and SEO if customers actually did that. So $1 for 2 months of WSJ and the 75 other sites linked to from here is not something I can afford.

Second, the mental fatigue from signing up and putting up with their spam for the rest of my life makes me sad just to imagine. Having a business relationship with hundreds of sites is complicated and not fun to manage.

If there was a way to pay a penny and then maybe 10 cents if I like it, I would gladly do it. But publishers value their content higher than that.

Flattr has a good idea where they would divide up your monthly media budget across publishers, but that didn’t take off. Brace Browser is similar.

I think the biggest issue is that I don’t trust publishers because all my interactions with them are unpleasant (eg, intrusive ads, spam, AstroTurf, etc).

The only real action I can take is to Adblock/corcumvent paywalls. That’s something I can do. Hopefully publishers will adjust models and stay in business. But if every paywall site goes out of business, I’m ok with that as well. I think the world would be net better off if we only had BBC/NPR/etc. definitely some downsides, but a net positive.