Paying a subscription for a single article is not worth it, and that's purely on monetary cost and not even accounting for the time it takes to fill the subscription form and then to cancel (and some newspapers make it extremely difficult to cancel).

If there was a universal system where people could pay ~1$ in one click without having to fill in a form or provide any personal data (to reduce the risk of spam), I'm sure most people would happily pay.

On the other hand, for a single product that you use significantly (like a social network) it makes sense to pay a subscription as opposed to having your time, attention and privacy compromised by ads.

There is no safe way to do microtransactions without also forking over some kind of personal data. How do you prevent identity theft in that world? I would go as far as to say the current Ads model is more private that a subscription or microtransaction based world.

Cheap. Private. Low-friction. Pick two.

I'm saying that a neutral third-party could be used to broker the payments and keep the details for auditing purposes.

I don't mind someone having my details, I just don't want that someone to be a party incentivized to spam me.

Sorry, but how is that any different than the role Google and Facebook play today? You're just proposing handing even more personal data over to what will become the next generation of big tech monopolies.

Compared to Google & Facebook, the neutral third party's business model would be to process payments as opposed to advertising, thus they won't have any incentives to collect/misuse personal data beyond what's necessary to provide the service.

I don't agree. Payment data are just as easily sold off as you seem to think advertisement data is. The incentives are the same, except one is pseudo-anonymous and the other is directly linked to your bank account.

This idea's selling point is that you are not tracked nor subject to marketing. If people start having any suspicions they will stop using the system (why pay and get tracked anyway ?) and the payment processor no longer has a business, thus everyone here would have an incentive of being honest otherwise they ruin the entire business model.

If you view it from a game theory perspective, both the ad business (your Google's and Facebook's) are subject to the same incentives as your Flattr's.

At the core of both of them is an economic transaction (direct dollars vs. ad impression), both of which use personal data like web history (to know which article has been "bought").

The big difference is the ad supported model is not linked to your bank account, and has some pseudonymous properties, but there is still the classic three-party structure of reader, publisher and platform, and still the huge pressure to be profitable.

1) So you're still having your personal web history tracked by a technology company, possibly even worse because it's linked to your bank

2) Economic pressures and incentives are roughly the same

3) End result is your data will eventually get sold anyway, much the same way that cable companies always introduced ads

I also have a belief but no hard data that advertisers pay more per impression than consumers ever will, which leads to this cycle happening in the first place. People seem to forget that the internet wasn't really profitable until targeted advertising, cutting that would mean the end of most web technology companies.

There isn't a technical limitation here. If in 2001 you had said that web content would be paid for by multiple auctions for advertising space between data brokers who know innumerable different facts about the reader, such as their recent browsing history, purchases, demographic info, happening in real-time while the page loads, it would have seemed technically unfeasible. $100 billion in annual revenue makes lots of things possible.

Sure there is: https://coil.com/ https://flattr.com/

Pay one subscription, visit sites. If those sites have a specific meta tag, add-on detects it, providing you with access to paywalled articles. The longer the site keeps my attention, the more of my subscription they get. They don't have to know a single thing about me other than "I'm using this service and I have a running subscription". Service aggregates those micropayments from their subscribers within a time frame and avoids transferring small transactions and fees associated to the website.

Also Brave Browser.

Yes, Brave has a mixed model for funding. If you don't opt in into Brave Rewards, you can still fund sites using your own money.

Although I agree a simple system to make it easier to pay small amount of money would help, I think $1 is not everyone would accept easily. Maybe regional pricing is necessary.

I'm happy to pay for subscriptions on sites I know bring value to me over time.

I'd never want to start/stop a subscription for a single article I randomly come across, and I have never stumbled upon a link that allows me to pay a buck or two to access this specific article I clicked on without starting a long term commitment with a site I've never heard of before.

I mean, you've just outlined the way that newspapers' business model is delusional and broken. Lots of people are prepared to pay them for something they make, but they have decided that they're only prepared to accept money in a specific way and on specific terms. In fact, most paywalls assume that that specific news outlet is the most important one in your life. None of them are prepared to offer you a plan based on the more realistic scenario that you occasionally want to read something of theirs of particular interest, but don't want their take on every story, nor their particular curation of what to read on a given day.

Great point. If there were a service I could subscribe to that would give revenue to content producers in a common network based on page views I'd be interested. I like to be able to follow links in news feeds to read particular articles but since they may be in dozens of different publications there is no way I'm going to subscribe to just any one of them.

edit: maybe this is what Apple News is? I can read lots of articles but have to go in through that portal, I can't click links on Reddit. Sometimes I do go into Apple News and find the same article but that is time consuming and inconvenient and often it isn't there.

> It is also filled with comments gist of which is “paywalled, didn’t read”.

I object mostly due to "free for me(FAANGS) but not for thee.

Said article is available to the Googlebot or to Facebook but not normal mortals.

If you want to be behind a wall, fine, be behind the wall--that is your prerogative. But the problem is that these articles clutter up my search results and I can't remove them.