News Corp, the New York Times and Axel Springer back Scroll, a subscription service from the former CEO of Chartbeat

How much would you pay to read lots of stories, from lots of digital publishers, without having to look at many ads? Tony Haile wants to find out. Haile is the former CEO of Chartbeat, the real-time analytics software used by most of the digital publishing world. Now he’s at work on a new company: Scroll, a startup that wants to roll up a selection of stories from a wide variety of publishers and sell monthly subscriptions.

The big selling point for readers: Haile says they’ll have a better experience than the one they have now, when they read web pages clogged with crummy ads. The big selling point for publishers Haile wants to recruit: He says they’ll make more money sharing subscription revenue with him than they do with those crummy ads. Scroll is a bit difficult to describe, in part because it seems to combine elements of things people have already tried. And in part because Haile hasn’t put it together yet. He has raised $3 million from investors including SoftTech, OATV, Axel Springer, News Corp and the New York Times. And he’s currently out pitching publishers to sign up. It won’t launch until 2017. But let’s try walking through it: Haile wants to create a subscription service that gives readers an ad-free, or nearly ad-free, reading experience for stories from a wide variety of publishers.