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I think if people pay for Netflix and Spotify, there's a market for a subscription to bypass paywalls.

there's definitely a market, but probably not at the revenue targets that newspapers have. I pay $12/mo for netflix, and $10/mo for spotify. i'd be happy to pay another ~$10/mo for a news service that gave me access to a similarly broad offering of newspaper articles.

but the way newspaper web-access subscriptions are priced, to get the same broad bundle of content as what i get from spotify or netflix i'd be paying thousands of dollars a month, which i'm absolutely not willing to do.

How would you feel about paying for pirated content? If someone just had publication subscriptions they could simply charge a small fee and show all the content on the sites. I could see small groups even do this and every time someone joins the monthly fee goes down.

paying for pirated stuff is a messy minefield, but it's actually a pretty interesting thought - piracy is what spurred the music industry to shift to new models that allowed more consumer-friendly businesses like spotify to exist. i've never even considered pirating a news website before, but it seems like the sort of thing that should be possible.

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