Back in the old days, you'd get a newspaper delivered, and you'd perhaps read it around the breakfast table or at your desk to find out what was going on in the world. The same paper, day in, day out. You'd read the columns, know which comics they ran, maybe do the crossword.

Some people still do this. That's nice. There's something great about reading a paper over a cup of coffee in the morning.

That doesn't apply to the web. Here's the Independent's paywall message:

Thank you for reading and relying on independent.co.uk for your news and information. You have now viewed your 30-day allowance of 5 FREE pages. Want to read more?

I'm sorry, The Independent, but I don't rely on you for anything. I don't read a linear paper on the web; I follow links curated by people I trust. The New York Times has no such illusions, meanwhile, but tells me, in all caps:

YOU’VE REACHED THE LIMIT OF 10 FREE ARTICLES A MONTH

Thanks, The New York Times. There's no need to shout.

The Independent's US price is $3.99 a month. The New York Times is a little more complicated, and expensive: $3.75 a week for the web and my phone, $5 a week for the web and my iPad, $8.75 a week for the web and my phone and my iPad, or all of the above plus a pile of dead trees every morning for the inexplicably lower price of $3.40 a week.

The New York Times is my favorite newspaper on earth, but imagine if I did this for every source I read on the web! I'd be broke, instantly. This is a model that scales well for the dead-tree economy, but doesn't work at all on the Internet, where you could easily read 10 sources in just a morning.

Hence advertising: the Independent knew I was unlikely to buy, so actually displayed a full video ad next to the advertisement asking me to subscribe. It clearly wasn't contextual, because it was for a Porsche - so it's a shot in the dark, basically. Awareness advertising with no real metrics (I assume) to back it up.

Another model must be found.

I don't think it's micropayments. Imagine if you had to pay for every single thing you read on the web, which is the future that micropayments promise. Just as if you paid for a subscription for every newspaper site on the web, if you're anything like me, you'd be broke pretty quickly. Or, alternatively, the payments would be of the kind that we've seen on subscription music services. That's a road that leads directly to Buzzfeed, where articles must be massively popular to turn a profit - and hence are impossibly populist.

In the old days, classified ads played more of a role. It's true that Craigslist's success disrupted $5 billion from the newspaper industry, but it's also true that this does not explain the hard times newspaper owners are experiencing. The context has changed, and attempts to drive traditional subscriptions show that the industry still hasn't full adapted to this. It's not that we're reading on multiple devices now, in different locations - it's that we're reading differently. The newspaper front page hasn't been our first stop in a long time.

Obviously, none of this is, well, news - countless articles have been written about this over the last decade. Yet, a solution has yet to be found. Which is a shame: journalism, newspapers and the communities they represent have become an important, and I'd say integral, part of the world in which we all live.