Sooooo, this is part of what I do. (My firm is also supported by the Google News Initiative.)

There have been so many Spotify for News businesses, and so far, none of them have worked. I see pitches for the model all the time. There’s actually a behavior change inherent to it that’s pretty tough to crack, let alone the organizational gymnastics needed to get every publisher in the world on board with the same system. (Blendle is the most successful but even they are not doing that well. They did do a fascinating study that shows people are more willing to pay for long form journalism than news, perhaps unsurprisingly.)

I’m the world’s biggest blockchain skeptic, but this really is somewhere where a distributed, ownerless ledger could help. One company I know is building distributed access control - and that starts to be more interesting as a model for paywalls. In that situation you “just” have to work with an open standard, rather than make deals with a central company. I think payment would likely break down as fixed unit economics rather than proportional allocation though.

It’s hard and there are a lot of intertwined issues that make it even more so. Hey, if anyone’s working on something better, I’ve got money for them.