I just don't see it happening. I remember the days of dial up internet - when I would be paranoid every minute I spent on the internet because every second I wa

I just don't see it happening. I remember the days of dial up internet - when I would be paranoid every minute I spent on the internet because every second I was online was costing more and more money. The sense of freedom I felt when I got fixed cost, always on broadband, was liberating. Nobody wants to go to a system where for every single article you click on you have to go through the process of deciding whether it is worth the money or not. Plus, how many times have you read some article, only to realise it was clickbait that did not really give you anything of use or substance at all; how much worse would that be when publications were literally trying to get you to part with some actual cash. I'm also not convinced the economics would work. The reason paid print magazines are stuffed full of adverts is that the cover price did not cover the cost of publishing them. Even online, proper journalism costs quite a bit of money. Writers, editors, proofreading: it all takes time that needs to be paid for. If you pay per article, do those who worked on the article only get paid if the article actually makes enough back to pay them? Do the publications aggregate all the payments and pay everyone out of aggragated sales? If an author is particularly popular, how do they negotiate a bigger fee? These things are not impossible to sort out, but the economics of publishing would require a big restructuring and all these things would need to be hashed out.