[eli]

I think this is even harder to make work than straightforward micropayments with crypto or paypal or similar.

Is it the same subscription fee no matter what publications I read or how many articles? (If it varies directly based on what I'm reading then I think it is just micropayments.)

Publications with healthy subscription revenue like WSJ or the Economist are not going to be interested in participating unless they get paid a lot of money and/or can be assured it somehow will not cannibalize their direct sales.

Who owns the customer relationship? Publishers have been burned pretty much 100% of the time they cede that direct relationship to someone else.

Also, it's been tried: see Scroll, Apple News, Flattr, Coil, Brave BAT...

[cyberax]

Scroll was successful. It provided more income than ads to participating companies. So it was hastily acquired and killed by Twitter.

Flattr required installing an extension (sorry, no), Brave is a whole separate browser, Coil was based around cryptocrap.

[eli]

I agree Scroll seemed very promising but I'm not sure how successful they were. Did they provide more income than ads from subscription fees? Meeting that goal while burning investors money is less impressive.

Scroll also used a browser extension by the way.