>I am never going to pay one publication a small fee every time I read an article

That's fine for you, but I also pay for subscriptions and have 8-10 publications that I'm not interested in subscribing to, but would pay some amount to read the odd adhoc article from them.

It's a hard game to figure out, because many sites feel like they're worth $20/mo, which is true if you are reading a large amount of their content. But if I'm looking at 1-4 articles a month from them, that's a huge per-article price, even a $1/article micropayment would be a deal for me. Add on top of that the shenanigans they play with ending subscriptions at so many of the sites...

Blendle [1] had this model for a while but shut it down a couple years ago. It was nice to have to option to buy individual articles from publications that I enjoy reading occasionally but not enough to subscribe.

[1] https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/08/the-poster-child-for-micro...

Washington Post tried cheap "day pass" subscriptions and they didn't really work.

Publishers already relying on subscription revenue need to be careful: some portion of the people already paying $20/mo could save a lot by switching to $1/article.

Newsrooms also hate that approach because of the incentive structure. A lot of the most important stories aren't the ones people want to spend $1 to read.

Maybe this is a silly question, but why don’t more publications offer multiple options? They’d have to tweak it some as they go but it seems to me it could be worth it