The trouble is that the ideal model (newspapers on the whole used to cost, like, 0.25c) is extremely tricky in the online space, because payments are high friction and small payments especially are not really economically viable. I'm not sure what solution could possibly exist that wouldn't involve some hyper-common payment provider building out a service to solve this specific thing, and then getting all the online news sites to agree to use it, and then getting most visitors to accept "I need to spend less than a dollar if I want to read this article" as normal and okay.
It's ... kinda crazy when I type it out.
But that's basically what advertisements do for publishers today, and if we're moving away from that model (and we *really* should), what do we replace it with?
The ideal model IMO would be P2P micropayments (hopefully a web standard implemented as a browser API), where the payment processor middleman is cut out, so small transactions become viable. Patreon allowing you to bundle and only be charged once for your handful of monthly subscriptions was a good half-measure and a great way to reduce the middleman's cut, but since its elimination, we're back to square one. It doesn't seem realistic to entrust an omnipresent payment provider with this, since they'll always collect a fixed amount of overhead per transaction, which will intrinsicially disincentivize smaller individual payments. But maybe I'm being overly paranoid in some aspects and naïve in others.
It's ... kinda crazy when I type it out.
But that's basically what advertisements do for publishers today, and if we're moving away from that model (and we *really* should), what do we replace it with?