Silly for digital media to try and leech off of the more successful tech cos. In general, digital media is scrambling with various monetization strategies. But they're thinking about the problem wrong. They obsess over how to monetize people already on their site. Instead, they should start asking how they can monetize people coming to their site. I think the proposition linked by OP is a very premature recognition of that. The proposed solution is way out in left field, but there are saner approaches, such as the use of interstitial advertising. Of course, now adblockers become relevant to the discussion, and I won't go down that rabbit hole (here, at least.)
Disclosure: I operate a link shortener [1] that pays people based on their traffic using interstitial advertising.