I have a subscription to a newspaper (on real paper!) not for the daily news (which as you say is fungible) but for these in-depth articles that go beyond the news, and provide some background and perspective.
The question is not 'Are there profits to be had when I can charge a penny every time someone reads an article on the internet?'. The hard question is 'How do I show people it is worth paying me a penny to read an article on the internet?'
But in the current age, bundling seems to be broken for 2 particular reasons:
- Most people discover content via their social networks (Twitter, Facebook, Reddit etc) where they have invested a long time to curate a set of individual journalists, public figures and acquaintances rather than orgs.
- Diversity of audience expects a rather focussed content curation from different view points rather than all encompassing single identity.
This makes me believe that going forward in future, people should be able to show appraisal to unique pieces rather than a wrapper organisation, based on their quality. This might be encourage grass root level curation by people who are incentivised for their effort rather than association with an existing brand.
To me, the difficulty is that there is no obvious win for the pay by article model and my experience is that people hate being nickeled and dimed. Charging is not necessarily the best route to build the goodwill necessary for donated effort toward curation and curation that relies on goodwill tends to attract players with financial motivations in addition to people with voluntarism in their hearts.