SiliconAlley: Our Second Biggest Mistake: Free Content: "It is entirely conceivable--and I promise that I'm not basing this on any inside knowledge--that a group of large Internet companies could create a network of sites that accepts a "Premium Content Pass," which for a fee of, say, $9.95 a month, entitles you to read premium content on around 30 or so quality sites around a niche. These sites would split the revenue based on the traffic reported to the Premium Content Pass central database, with a small percentage of the overall subscriptions shared across all sites (to ensure that even the small sites get a taste)."

The idea of a billing intermediary is making its way.