You can aggregate without it being free. Imagine a website that does news aggregation. To access the website, you have to pay $10 per month. For this $10 per m

You can aggregate without it being free. Imagine a website that does news aggregation. To access the website, you have to pay $10 per month. For this $10 per month, you have the right to read all of the news posted on the website. The website allows individual freelance writers to put their articles on it. Now here's the catch - the $10/month that each user pays actually gets distributed by that user to writers whose articles he appreciates. So everytime he reads an exceptionally good article, he gets to assign some of his $10 to that article, as much as he wants. At the end of the month, whether he assigns the money or not, he loses the 10 bucks. If he assigned all $10 to writers, that's fine. If he left some over, that goes to the website and is used to pay for editors, servers, hackers, etc. This creates a situation where people are paying for aggregated content (you'd have a plethora of social networking, commenting, and rating systems tailored in whatever way is determined to be optimal) and the writers who are most appreciated by the readers are getting paid. At the same time, the readers get to try out as much writing as they want for free, so stuff is NOT hidden behind a paywall. They can read the article first and if they find it useful to them can award their dollars. If not, they don't. This encourages quality and also encourages a wide readership. Anyway I would totally pay $10/month for a system like this. I think you would actually see the case that many people would voluntarily choose to pay more than $10/month just so they can contribute more to their favourite authors. The whole "Radiohead Rainbows" effect. Feel free to steal my idea and make it a Y-Combinator startup.