One key reason why assertions that are short on facts and long on psychodrama are now overwhelming mass communications is that electronic versions of responsible print periodicals have taken themselves out of competition for the public’s eyeballs, via clumsy attempts to generate revenue online.

You encounter the results every day on social media:  somebody you know shares a link to an article in a well-established and reliable media outlet, but when you click on it, you find you can’t actually read it, unless you either disable your ad blocker or buy a subscription.

Since the whole purpose of the ad blocker was to keep your reading from being disrupted by a barrage of pop-ups, where did the magazine get the idea you might be favorably disposed to letting them and their advertisers do this to you?

As for their alternative, paying them enough to read a full year's worth of their content, the fact that you don’t already have a subscription pretty clearly indicates you’re not interested in doing this.   

These days, many  publishers  seem to think they've come up with a reasonable compromise by letting you read a few articles for free, in order to develop an appreciation for what they have to offer, and then requiring you to buy a subscription if you want to continue reading it.  If they had only thought through this proposition a bit more, though, they might have realized that it's the equivalent of McDonald’s giving you 3 free Big Macs to convince you that they taste good, but then demanding that you buy 365 of them if you want to eat a single one more.  An approach like this is no more likely to succeed  in the realm of periodicals than it would be in burger world.

What online periodicals really need is a sensible way to charge you only for what you read.  If they could do this, they could cast a much broader net, gaining many more readers than would be willing to pay enough to read every single article in every single edition for a year via a subscription. They’d be offering a larger potential market a new consumption model which better reflects readers’ actual preferences, rather than just what they’re willing to put up with in the form of today’s all-or-nothing subscription demands. 

Magazines that adopt a pay-only-for-what-you-read approach could therefore confidently look forward to an overall increase in revenue. This increase could in turn be enough to free the publishers from their current financial need to constantly annoy their readers with pop-up ads. 

What stands in the way of adopting the new payment model?  Today, the bank associations that process online payments to the publishers charge such a stiff fee for processing any transaction, whether large or small, that it would be impossible for the publishers to make a reasonable profit from a fee small enough that you’d be willing to pay it to read just one article. 

Fortunately, certain sites with substantial ongoing readership have already found a way around this conundrum.  They sell blocks of content access, so the fee can be spread over multiple pieces of content.  

It wouldn’t be all that big a jump for a more enterprising transaction processor to enable you to spread your block of pre-paid reads across many sites.  In such an arrangement, if there was a standard cost to you of a dime per page, you could buy a block of 50 pages from a wide mix of participating magazines and newspapers for $5.00—less than you might spend on a latte. 

It's not exactly a stretch to predict that many people would prefer this arrangement to the horrendous experience of today’s ad-funded e-publishing continually throwing trash in our faces while we're trying to read.  

Also, once revenue is being generated directly by people reading online pages, it will become feasible to offer services that advertisers aren’t willing to pay for.