This is still direct via donations. Just by a few doing it for the many.<p>So the question is, who are these special few?<p>NYT times costs hundreds of millions to run. That&#x27;s just a single publisher. Most major sites require somewhere in the 8 figures. As theory and data have shown, human behavior is not conducive to paying if you can avoid it. Unless your plan is to turn content publishers into tax-funded state-run companies, I fail to see how this could possibly work.<p>* Before it&#x27;s mentioned: Wikipedia is perhaps the only example of donations working at scale. However, it&#x27;s not really working because Wikipedia doesn&#x27;t produce any content. It&#x27;s also not a business. Wikimedia which is an actual business runs the wikia.com network of sites and they&#x27;re all monetized through ads.