The thing that bothers me most with the current pay wall situation is that I'm not against paying for journalism in general, in fact I favor it: Reward good work with good money.

The problem is the inflexible payment methods. I want to be able to pay some cents for a single article quickly and conveniently. But most online newspapers offer only a month+ long subscription. That's asking way too much, I want really want just this single article. And all the other stuff that you're also giving me access to I simply wouldn't use.

I like to read up on specific topics from a variety of sources but the current economic models heavily punish my archetype of costumer. I simply can't afford to open up hundreds of subscriptions over the course of a year.

Now often I simply fall into the X free articles per month category because I stray across so many different media outlets but that feels bad too because I actually want to pay for individual articles and help preserve journalism but there's no means. Best I can do currently is rotate some subscriptions each month and free ride on the rest.

In the paper era you could at least grab an individual issue (not an individual article, series or section thougn) at a newsstand and weren't locked in.

The web desperately needs infrastructure to effortlessly and quickly transfer small amounts of currency - change my mind. European Central Bank is working on a digital Euro which could lead to this but that's many years down the road and also going to depend a lot on their implementation.