I think one of the main problems with the idea of papers making their websites subscription based in order to generate revenues is precisely that - subscription is a model that's unlike most newspaper purchases. And also there's the problem of the method payment.
Most people who buy a paper, they go into a newsagent, pick up a paper and give the newsagent some change.
irl, the purchaser who takes a paper to the newsagent's counter isn't told, no, I'm sorry, you can't buy today's paper by itself, but you can buy it if you subscribe to buying the newspaper for today, this week, this month or the next six months, by handing over your credit card and letting me retain your credit card details on our you've-no-idea-how-secure-or-insecure-it-is database for future transactions, because we'll automatically re-subscribe you when this subscription runs out, unless you remember to cancel your subscription by the deadline.
If you went into your local newsagent and they insisted on you giving them your credit card details and them retaining it on a database, you'd probably do a risk:benefit calculation and think is it worth my credit card details being stored on a database and susceptible to fraud, all for the sake of buying a 70p newspaper? It's probably not.
And there's also the matter of choice. If I go into a newsagent, I'm not tied to buying the Guardian every time I want to buy a newspaper, I have a choice, and so if the front page of the Independent or the Times catches my eye, I can buy that instead, and I wouldn't be thinking, it's annoying that I'm paying for the Independent today, when the Guardian already has my money for today's news via that subscription that I had to sign up for.
If newspapers want to generate revenues from their online services, then they have to realise that the subscription model that forces people to give over their credit card details and subscribe for long term isn't going to win over people who irl purchase newspapers in a completely different way.
If there was a way of managing the transaction differently, then it might be feasible. Whether that means facilitating small change transactions with something like a paypal account, which in turn means more people signing up for paypal accounts, or whether that means going down a different route, say, making it possible to pay via a mobile phone text service or something, I don't know.
But at the moment, the subscription models considered by the newspapers are like trying to force a square peg into a round hole. The square peg is the customer/reader who is used to making small value one-off transactions of choice in their local newsagents, being forced into handing over their credit card details for retention in a database to take out a longer term subscription.
