No, that's the problem. If I want to listen to Lady Gaga, I can do that from any of the music services. The artist gets a cut from my monthly payment to whiche

No, that's the problem. If I want to listen to Lady Gaga, I can do that from any of the music services. The artist gets a cut from my monthly payment to whichever service I use. If I want to read an article about traveling to Iceland during Covid times and it's in Washington Post while I subscribe to the New York Times, I can't, unless I subscribe to the Washington Post. Maybe a writer writing to NYT does get money according to the amount of clicks to their article. Some articles can even be free and the money comes from ad revenue. But it's still a small walled garden. People just don't get to see many well written articles because they are locked behind this small garden paywall and most people don't want to pay the entrance fee. How about a "Writer Money Distribution service". People could subscribe to it. You could build a curated edited newspaper out of such articles, if you wanted. But a user could also read any article, and they would know that their monthly money would be distributed to the writers according to the what they did read. There could be even multiple services and the same writer could publish to multiple with no exclusivity clause. Edit: Hell, Hacker News is one excellent article curation service that has supplanted the place of a newspaper. But there's no revenue feedback mechanism. What does the writer benefit from being linked to from HN? Many people use some go-around-the-paywall service since they don't want to subscribe, which indeed would be irrational for only a few articles every now and then.