Or how much are you willing to pay?
I am thinking about the local newspaper. Mine suggests $60 per year as a donation. Or you can read for free-mostly.
NYT did a $4 per quarter offer that I signed up for because Reddit links to them often enough. I’m ready to “donate” rather than subscribe to the Guardian for the same reason. Washington Post was charging 9.99 per month for online access. I cancelled and they offered 9.99 for the YEAR What silly games they play.
I would pay for this site too but can’t pay by the hour -that would be a lot 
So what is a fair metric that is good for the developer and the consumer?
Charge enough to cover your costs and then some, but not so much to discourage readership growth. They have to walk a fine line.
Like anything else, it’s all about supply and demand. You can see yourself, the more popular sites are in more demand, so they can charge more, and Reddit links are a good way to become in-demand. Personally, I don’t do Reddit, but I do get a different news consolidator, and I ended up deciding to pay for the NYT too.
But exactly how much to charge? Nobody has figured out that formula yet. You can see that even the big guns are still doing trial and error.
One problem is charging for something that used to be free. For example, there are lots of free news websites out there. For NYT to get you to pay for their site, their coverage has to be demonstrably better than the free sites. I would argue that it is better, but others would disagree. How many dollars a month better? That’s where trial and error pricing comes in.
Maybe what they need to do is charge the internet providers for content like cable tv and let the providers set prices accordingly. Ugh
I’m trying to decide how to be fair to creators not resellers. What was set up last century may not be the best way in the future. Like paying to remove ads seems to defeat the revenue stream purpose for a small local website. They can’t get companies to advertise if they don’t have eyeballs to sell. Maybe a ha’penny per link.
I just looked at Yahoo finance premium- They want 39.95 per month which is crazy expensive. Motley Fool is $200 a year. Would they get more by being a lot cheaper.
I have other ways to piss away my money.
The only way this could really work for most web sites is bundles. Pay $2 a month and get access to a set of a dozen or more useful web sites. But this is not how these people think. E.g., ordinary newspapers wanting to charge $100+ a year for online access where most of their content is already available on their web site for free.
Charging a ;arge amounts for a single site is targeting a more well-heeled, small group. This is the way a lot of businesses work today. Go after the few with money. Ignore the financials of everybody else.
One of the problems for pay news sites is that you can just highlight>search the headline and you’ll get 20 sites that either copy the article outright or have a similar article for free.