“We are flooded with so much information that we don’t really want or need,” Michael Wheeler, founder of an “a la carte journalism” startup, said in an interview with The News Hook. “I spend a lot of time on my RSS feeds saying, ‘No, I don’t want to read that.’

“People do that in traditional media,” he added. “You open up The New York Times and thumb through 5-6 pages before you pick a story to read.”

Creator Rob Wijnberg told The Editor's Weblog he originally thought De Correspondent had a 50 percent chance of meeting its goal of 15,000 members. But as of Thursday, more than 17,000 people have shelled out €60 for an annual subscription to the news site, set to launch in September. According to the site, 48 members have additionally donated €1,000 or more to fund the project.

“We were overwhelmed, especially by how fast it was and especially by how much enthusiasm people showed for the initiative,” Wijnberg said. “People really mailed us lots of letters and tweets and everything saying that ‘I’m so glad you started this.’ We didn’t expect that.”

While this sort of drive is unusual, it is not unprecedented. Several years ago Italian newspaper Il Fatto Quotidiano similarly preemptively fundraised, and collected €5 million from 30,000 advance subscribers in 3 months.

De Correspondent has been in the works since Wijnberg quit his job as editor of Dutch national newspaper NRC Next in September. He said he noticed how people are “hounded by news” — often “struck by the same news from all different directions.”

The paywall, set to take effect this summer, will allow each visitor 20 complementary page views per month, excluding the home page and classifieds section. The newspaper hopes to maintain most of its 17 million monthly unique visitors.

Such a metered model has proven successful for other newspapers including The New York Times, which Columbia Journalism Review said generates $100 million through digital subscriptions.

In addition to not counting clicks from search engines and social media, the paywall will allow unlimited access from schools, government and military workplaces, notable as more than 20 percent of District of Columbia residents are federal employees, according to Forbes. But Don Graham, chairman and CEO of The Washington Post Co., has previously noted that locals provide less than 10 percent of the newspaper’s online traffic. This statistic made him previously wary of charging for online access, as he predicted that bundling digital subscriptions with print wouldn’t be as successful for The Post as for other papers.