The more I think about services like this, the more I think everyone is thinking about this problem the wrong way. People are thinking about the problem, as a)

The more I think about services like this, the more I think everyone is thinking about this problem the wrong way. People are thinking about the problem, as a)it costs money to produce great content, b) great content should be supported by people who enjoy that content, and c) ads and other current monetization efforts are annoying/bad/potentially dangerous for users. So, the obvious solution, which from my perspective (has not and will not work at scale) is, "have people pay to block ads and give the money to publishers, or have publishers offer premium ad-free content. The thing that all of these ideas are missing is the switching cost to find other interesting content is next to nothing. There is already too much content bombarding us, and I have no problem reading someone elses content for free. Even if it means missing out on a headline that caught my attention. All I need to do is go back to my facebook newsfeed, or HN, and find 50 other articles I am interested in reading. I do think there is a solution out there, but I don't think it will come from paying to block ads (which feels like an exortion racket) or paying for article you like. As counter-intuitive as it sounds, I think a great solution for everyone involved would be to charge money to share the content. Charging for distribution and licensing content has always been a money maker for publishers, why not charge for social distribution. My idea: Donate between $0.05 and $100 to share an article. Your post would say, "I just paid $1.25 to share this article, it's that good!" This solves multiple problems. a)the quality of what gets shared will go up, which in turn would make the shares much more valuable in terms of building an engaged audience and your own social cred and validation that you are seeking when you share. b)the amount you pay to share would reflect how much you liked the content. (i.e. an incredibly funny video that I want all my friends to see would be worth a few bucks to share, whereas a semi interesting one would be only $0.05...and in turn, my friends will learn to only watch my large donation shares... and the ratings of the content can be quantified by the audience. (i.e. this article generated $3450 in shares tells me much more than 34,500 people shared it.) Making this frictionless would be difficult and getting publishers to risk their "virality" would be hard to sell...but, it's a crazy enough idea it just might work. After all, the switching costs of not sharing an article you really want to share is much greater than paying to see content in the first place or paying a monthly fee when the problem is not gnawing at you in the moment.