I wonder if this would be the case for Paypal Subscriptions. I am already using that for a couple of sites, albeit they are with video content. Each is a couple of Euros a month.

So, you wouldn't need to share your payment details with any publisher, but with just one , that distributes it further. This is really similar with the system in place in some countries, when you wanted to get a subscription to a newspaper, a central collecting money company would take your request, invoice you, etc, and distributed the newspaper to your door.

Again, old business, "but on the internet". And if we don't like paypal, we can always build something better, right?