I have the opposite problem: I don't want to buy a single article, I want a subscription that works on every news site. Individual article purchases suck for th

I have the opposite problem: I don't want to buy a single article, I want a subscription that works on every news site. Individual article purchases suck for the same reason that individual source subscriptions suck. We learned a decade and change ago that microtransactions are a bad idea and very difficult to account for. Mental and payment network transaction costs dominate if you actually ask for tiny amounts of money all the time. Functional microtransaction schemes work by separating the point of payment from the point at which costs are accrued. This is ostensibly to batch transactions together, but also has the effect of making it far harder to consider how much you've actually spent. Users either agonize about spending a penny to read another article, or they get sticker shock from how many articles they read per month. No one likes being nickeled and dimed, so subscriptions offer an escape valve for all of this. Instead of charging the user some accrued cost that they can't really budget for, you just charge them a fixed amount per month for unlimited access to a given resource. If we can't expect the customer to spend money when everything is a transaction cost, then we shouldn't bother tracking those accrued costs. Just figure an average amount of what it should cost and bill them at the end of each month. This works great if the subscription service is largely all-inclusive for the service that you are purchasing. The way most news paywalls work is sort of like "quartering and dollaring". You see, most people don't go straight to a single news site to get all of their news. They go to aggregators, find the story they're looking for, and then go to that particular site. So the paywall on those sites is fundamentally indistinguishable from a microtransaction popup, except instead of wanting 10 cents to read one article, they want $10/mo to read all their articles. It's not like actually subscribing to any of these will actually fix the problem, since there's tens to hundreds of different paywalled sources out there. I don't want to subscribe to one news source - I want a variety. For the record, the only service I know of that aggregates news and has a subscription option is Apple News+. As someone who daily-drives an Android phone and a Windows desktop, this service is mostly useless to me. Don't get me wrong, I do have access to iOS and macOS devices, I'm just not interested in a news service that only works on two of the six or so different computing devices I have access to. "Oh, this article is paywalled, I guess I need to pull out my iPod" is not materially different from "Oh, this article is paywalled, I guess I need to pull out a browser I don't normally use". (Alternatively, Google could revert the changes to their ad system they made that moved advertising revenue away from third-party publishers, and we could go back to publisher advertising being able to pay for this content.)