It's possible that my observations won't solve the problem. But, we agree on the fundamental that content providers either need payment from the consumer or fro

It's possible that my observations won't solve the problem. But, we agree on the fundamental that content providers either need payment from the consumer or from ads or both. Right now content publishers are often taking money from ad agencies in lieu of charging the consumer (no blinding revelation there). My assertion is that I'm more than willing to pay for content (as long as there are no ads), but I don't want to enter into subscription relationships with every content publisher I go to. I was also trying to implicitly state that I don't want to pay for a full issue of (for example) The Economist when I'm interested only in one article. Paper-based publications had to be that way; I'm skeptical that digital publications do. Publishers who do allow per-article payment methods are often pricing individual articles so high that it would be impractical for me to pay for all the content I want to read. I've been careful to use "publisher" because the publisher is often the proxy for the authors whose content we read. It may be that we need to enter into more direct relationships with authors rather than their proxies. It seems like we need an "App Store" for articles. It may make things worse, I'm not really sure.