This is indeed a huge problem. In the current form, it quickly become unsustainable (in terms of both time and money) for customers to work with so many subscriptions. Maybe the end state is Netflix/Prime like platform for digital news wherein the platform can share the subscription revenue across all the participating media companies depending on the usage. The argument against that is - these platforms now control what is produced, their price and distribution. Such an arrangement will eventually subvert democracy.
Our team is working on creating a micro payments platform called ana.money.
We don't see this as micropayments vs subscriptions. But micropayments & subscriptions. Media outlets (text/audio/video) will benefit from offering both these forms of payments to let customers access their content.
Our goal is to build an infrastructure that supports this worldview. We will make it incredibly easy for publishers to sell both individual articles and subscriptions: taking care of user identity, invoicing, taxation, cross border/multi-currency, etc..
I think what would be much better is a redefinition of the publisher role: Most (big) news outlets already run a lot of their own infrastructure. Web servers, this whole paywall mess, etc etc.
What if they could just provide their articles through an API (which is also consumed by their own website) and aggregators can route these articles to their users. Aggregators would become publishers of sort.
Let me flesh it out a bit.
Scenario 1) I am a subscriber of news-site1.com. I have an account with their system. I can read all their articles on their website. At the same time I browse this news-aggregator1.com. They collect lots of links, and with the power of SSO/OAuth I can already read all news-site1.com articles directly on news-aggregator1.com (since they are consuming the API with my account). Additionally I have an account with news-aggregator1.com and pay them a fee, which allows me to read N articles from any outlet they have connected with.
Scenario 2) news-aggregator2.com does not offer a subscription base, but is connected to all the APIs of the news outlets. Their users can buy on an per-article bases from all connected news outlets and the articles are saved into the user's account.
Just two scenarios how this _could_ look like. The reasons I think this is not done is 1) you lose ad traffic, which is somewhat predictable, 2) you lose predictability/control in general 3) nobody has done something like that and made it work, so there is little confidence 4) they might just be right and it only appeals to a small audience
If I am not wrong, this is what both Facebook and Apple trying to do. Both these platforms can sell individual articles but they choose not to do so due to high overhead in the payments infrastructure.
The problem in such a model is that the negotiating power of the publishers is much lower. And hence, they are always at the mercy of these aggregators. And I believe that will be the natural tendency of the aggregators, since they control the distribution.
Platforms like Scroll & Magzter are still in early times while Facebook and Apple are way ahead. All of them will invest in algorithms to surface personalised recommendations for users. They can easily tweak the algorithms to lean the way they wish to & the motivations will not always be clear since customers don't have visibility into their recommendation algorithms. And this will have a great impact on the Publisher since their revenue depends greatly on these recommendations favouring their content.
Our team is working on creating a micro payments platform called ana.money.
We don't see this as micropayments vs subscriptions. But micropayments & subscriptions. Media outlets (text/audio/video) will benefit from offering both these forms of payments to let customers access their content.
Our goal is to build an infrastructure that supports this worldview. We will make it incredibly easy for publishers to sell both individual articles and subscriptions: taking care of user identity, invoicing, taxation, cross border/multi-currency, etc..