Amazon’s Kindle Fire has, perhaps broken a barrier with the easiest access to online magazine subscriptions I’ve seen. That’s the strength of the Fire: it’s an incredibly effective portal for buying content – and, frankly, anything else Amazon has to offer. The Fire’s downsides are:

Size: The 7-inch screen is simply too small for enjoyable magazine or newspaper reading. Even the magnification feature doesn’t go far enough, and it intereferes with smooth nagivation on the page and from one page to the next.

Weight: Holding the fire is a little bit like holding a flat, shiny, somewhat sexy brick. It’s a load – though it might provide interesting synergy with a bodybuilding magazine.

More-than-occasional glitchiness: The touch-screen doesn’t always respond well; sometimes it seems too sensitive and others not sensitive enough. For magazine and newspaper viewing, that makes page scrolls and page turns an unpleasant guessing game.

Limited media offerings: All of the other issues will likely be mitigated in subsequent versions of the Fire. But where Amazon’s strength has always been the scope of available content, periodical choices seem limited. Perhaps I’m wrong on that; perhaps the available choice reflect the current  range of publications that have dedicated themselves to the future of digital content consumption. But if Amazon wants to emerge as the leading content delivery platform, than it’s going to need to move away from teh curated approach that it takes with apps and seems to be taking with periodicals.

So what other options do magazine publishers have if they don’t want to be limited by (or captive to) Amazon’s subscription model?

Here’s an interesting new approach: TinyPass.com is a startup paywall service that offers the kind of flexibility publishers need. Payment can be accepted through any means – from PayPal to Amazon to Google Wallet to a dedicated merchant account. And content can be delivered in any distribution model: paywall, metered, pay-per-use, etc. According to PaidContent, it even accommodates varied content models – such as the ability to split revenue with contributors.

TinyPass is a young copy and I’ve not done enough due diligence to predict its success. But it certainly represents the kind of flexibile functionality that the publishing world needs if its growth curve for selling digital content is going to continue.

At the time of its launch, News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch – who may be the world’s most aggressive evangelist for the concept of people actually paying for digital content – said he would consider The Daily to be successful when it has 500,000 subscribers.

Assuming The Daily maintains its average of 10,000 new subscribers per month, that puts it at its defined level of success in another 42 months – less than five years from startup.

For a big-deal project that utilizes new technology and depends on changing some of the most basic behaviors of its intended audience, that doesn’t sound like a bad ramp-up to me.

USA Today took far longer to become successful. Facebook became bigger faster, but it has never charged users and it took at least as long for the company to deploy a meaningful business model. Netflix expected to LOSE nearly 600,000 subscribers in 2011′s Q3 – simply because it removed DVD service as a cheap add-on for its paid digital (streamed) content. Compared to these, The Daily appears to be moving toward its goals very nicely.

The Daily also hasn’t expanded beyond the iPad platform, which has limited potential subscribers. If/when it’s made available for Droid devices and the new generation of e-readers, I expect that paid subscriptions will begin to increase beyond an average of 10,000 per month. By the time it has 250,000 or so subscribers, enough people will hear about The Daily in the course of their ordinary comings and goings that it will also pass a threshold of importance for a whole new audience of people who, at this moment, still refuse to spend money on a digital subscription.

Over time, the notion of paying for digital content will become normal; at that point, many of the media that are waiting for The Daily to fail will begin to benefit from the expensive groundwork that Murdoch’s company has chosen to undertake. They too will begin charging for their content; they too will struggle until reaching a level of critical mass. But they’ll have the luxury of doing that work without the scrutiny that The Daily is receiving now.

I’m saying all this without ever having read The Daily, as I’m not an iPad user. Perhaps it’s not a great product. Perhaps even people within News Corp. are disappointed that The Daily has just 80,000 paid subscriptions.

But I’ve learned over time that the toughest sell is the one that requires prospective buyers to change their behavior before spending money. At that, it sounds to me like The Daily is already successful.

While the drop in advertising isn’t new for newspapers, it hasn’t always been their No. 1 problem. Credit for that goes to the systemic and ongoing declines in circulation. Newspapers are simply less relevant across society than they once were.

But the dynamic behind shrinking advertising is different; it’s more like the experience of magazines – especially business-to-business – over the past decade.

I’ve written about the reasons behind the loss of advertising for magazines, and I’m not alone. The issue isn’t that advertising has ceased to work; I don’t believe that’s the case now, nor do I foresee the day when it is.

The issue is that other things now work better. And by other things, I really mean one other thing: social media.

First, more people are involved in social media than in any other media channel. If you lump together YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, Slideshare and the thousands of other social media websites, day-to-day participation is as broad as any other media channel.

Further, in most cases participation is free – even for the marketers, at the most basic level.

Further still, results are always measurable.

The equation is really simple: Marketers who are pulling back on their traditional advertising are merely following the lead of other marketers. And those who are not actively involved in social media are negligent. Marketers need to be where the people are, so they simply aren’t going to ignore a media channel that has so quickly attracted a large percentage of the world’s population.

I could predict that advertising revenues are going to continue their decline for newspapers, because consumer advertisers are now discovering what business-to-business advertisers learned several years ago: With social media, you can  (and should) become your own publisher – developing an audience and serving it with meaningful, interesting and helpful content.

That doesn’t mean newspapers, magazines or any other type of print media are doomed. But newspapers of the future will be very different than they were just six years ago. The sooner they figure out how to unhitch their fortunes from advertising, the better off they’ll be.