Few Americans pay for news when they encounter paywalls

I was pondering this earlier today while manually prepending archive.is to a pay walled link on my Android phone for the umpteenth time today.

The micro-transaction proposals everyone cried about in the early 2000's would have been so much better than this.

The odds of me paying for a subscription for some tiny local newspaper on the other side of the country are literally nil, but I'd be far more willing toss you a penny or two to read the content of a single article.

We really just need a good aggregator.

Because with legislative arrangements like Australias, thats what Facebook and Twitter have become, just with advertising money paying the newsies instead.

Pay some middle man in CASH MONEY to view 100 articles per month.

Blendle tried that here. It didn't work out for them; publishers wanted more money, competition disappeared because news publishers all congregated into three giant blobs. People registered, tried the app once, and then never put any money into the app again.

Now they sell Netflix-style aggregate subscriptions. It's mostly gossip rags and magazines these days.