Ask HN: Are ads the only way to “pay” for content on the web?

I understand that I could pay by subscribing to content but that's not really scalable when I could be consuming an @medium post one minute, then reading an nytimes article the next. I'd spend all my day handling subscriptions.

Why isn't there a metered content consumption platform where you pay X/month and depending on what content providers you visited in a month, this platform writes them a check?