It's hard. I wouldn't pay a subscription to a micro transaction middle man, for example. Unless it would work like a music service, i.e. have everything available for one price, and not like a video service with their islands and attempts to differentiate.

But if they had everything, you'd end up with a gatekeeper that decides who can make money and who can't, and that ends up as censorship. If such a service ever comes up, i want to be able to pay for any site with it, including porn, right wing propaganda and left wing propaganda if i so choose. And that ain't going to happen.

Now suppose there would be competing services where you could pay 5 cents for an article read, and they'd bill you when you reach $10 or something for the transaction fees to make sense. That's okay, you pay per read, you can have accounts with several middle men because you pay per use.

But what do you pay for? One read? What if something comes up and you can't finish? Will you be able to save it for later reading or will that cost extra?

Perpetual access? With per-article access control that's going to be a major database after a while. Hard problem technically.

And I've only begun to think about it...

Google was playing around with ad-replacement purchases, but they never made a version that does the same thing as youtube: pay X and all the google ads go away.