Why isn't there a startup that lets you pay to read paywalled articles?

Google actually tried this, but it failed: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Contributor

Apple News+ does something similar: https://www.apple.com/apple-news/publications/

There's another system like this: Your local library turns tax dollars into free books and articles, sometimes digital ones too. Worth checking. At the very least, many bigger ones have on-site (on their network) access to digital newspapers, journals, and magazines.

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I think it's the same reason we used to have all streaming on Netflix, but now every content publisher has their own streaming service. They make more that way, presumably, and have a branded product rather than relying on some intermediary that blends them altogether into an amorphous blob of "content".

They don't want to see articles turn into generic commodities the way movies, games, and music already are. The newspaper industry is barely alive as it is, and losing money and people every year... maybe they'll see another boost from the inevitable controversies of the new administration (again), as they did in 2016-2020, but short of that, it's kinda a dying industry with a lot of consolidation and reused/syndicated content.

If you don't want to pay, just go to APnews.com. It's where most smaller papers get their stories from anyway.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blendle tries but existed the German market. The wikipedia article is a bit outdated. One was able to search articles and then pay per article. If I recall 40-75 Euro cent. Then you downloaded a PDF file. I guess the news publishers insist on subscriptions.

With unifying subscriptions you'd compete against Apple News Plus and Google Play Newsstand. Companies with big pockets.

> Currently, it seems paid newspapers are developing their own solutions, meaning I have to subscribe to each one individually to read the news.

You've answered your own question right there.

Follow the money:

Actual subscriber: $X per month

Paywall clearing house setup: $X÷Y per month (where Y is the division ratio of your payment to the clearing house vs. the clearing house's payment to the publisher) [1].

With $X being greater than $X÷Y, the publisher has an incentive to "go their own way" because they believe they will receive more revenue per reader that way.

[1] And the clearing house may even be worse, in that it may be some $X÷Z per read, where the Z divisor produces a value significantly smaller than $X per month.