What online periodicals really need is a sensible way to charge you only for what you read. If they could do this, they'd gain many more readers than would be willing to pay for a traditional subscription, because they'd finally have a monetization model that's acceptable to online consumers.
In a technical sense, this would not be a heavy lift. The bigger challenge is likely to be convincing today's publishers of the desirability of pursuing such a course of action.
A useful place to start would be to take a clear-eyed look at the fundamental essence of magazines and other periodicals. This has always been to provide a mechanism for people to buy pieces of writing that are too short to constitute a full-on book.
We tend not to appreciate this until we consider the alternatives.
Can you imagine what would happen if all the magazines you now see on a newsstand were sliced up into their individual articles and sold separately? How many times longer than its current size would a newsstand have to be to accommodate all of them? And how would you tell which stories might suit your personal tastes and preferences?
Physically bundling these items into the collections we now call magazines was needed to enable the dissemination of shorter written content in times when everything we read was in hard-copy form.
In various ways, paper magazines have traditionally also mitigated risk.
From the standpoint of consumers like you and me, having a piece of writing included in a periodical we trust has meant that it meets our standards, so the odds are good that we'll like it. Also, if one piece isnt of particular interest to us, our purchase isn't a total waste of money, since there will almost always be other items that we enjoy.
For the same reason that we can be assured that there will be at least some pieces we like in each edition, the publisher can count on selling at least some copies of any issue—mitigating the risk of spending a lot of money to produce something no one actually buys, while at the same time not running short of an item in high demand.
Subscriptions enable publishers to further reduce the risk of printing too many copies, while at the same time guaranteeing them an income stream.
These arrangements made perfect sense in an age when the written word required a paper dodcument. Unfortunately, they made so much sense that contemporary publishers are having difficulty thinking past them, as the written word evanesces into a cosmic dimension consisting of only on/off micro-pulses of electrical charge.
