I work in the online advertising space. Unwilling is probably an understatement.
Although "people" shell out tons of money on casual/social Facebook games and such, they are incredibly price sensitive to content like news or videos. They also use AdBlock to basically steal content without letting publishers recoup the production costs and other investments.
I've spoken to and worked with several major publisher networks over the years that have tried various solutions with subscriptions but every attempt has led to a massive backlash or drop in traffic as users would rather go elsewhere then pay to read. Just look at how much negative feelings there are towards paywalls or any site that requires membership.
There have been trials already by Google to solve for this but the original idea with Google Wallet [1] failed and they're now trying out the Contributor program [2] but still having trouble.
Although "people" shell out tons of money on casual/social Facebook games and such, they are incredibly price sensitive to content like news or videos. They also use AdBlock to basically steal content without letting publishers recoup the production costs and other investments.
I've spoken to and worked with several major publisher networks over the years that have tried various solutions with subscriptions but every attempt has led to a massive backlash or drop in traffic as users would rather go elsewhere then pay to read. Just look at how much negative feelings there are towards paywalls or any site that requires membership.
There have been trials already by Google to solve for this but the original idea with Google Wallet [1] failed and they're now trying out the Contributor program [2] but still having trouble.
[1] http://www.digitaltrends.com/web/google-launches-micropaymen...
[2] https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/