Are you describing Blendle[0]? Access to paywalled content on a pay-per-article basis.
From what I remember, they're a closed platform. One must use their apps to get access to full article content. That's a nice solution for their partners, but not for the broader web (85%+ of the websites you stumble across that are not TIME, NYT, Economist, etc).
Blendle is a nice experiment, but I wouldn't consider it a solution to the problem being discussed here.