Call me old-fashioned, but I think that's a very good monetization model for the web that I can definitely get behind. It's almost exactly like ads in dead-tree newspapers, which is to say much less intrusive than the ones on TV, for example.

Or like how Troy Hunt does it on his blog: he just sells his top banner for ad space, with strict rules for the size of the ad. Of course this only works if you already have a sizeable following, but for the end user I view it as a very unintrusive way of monetizing.

Microtransansactions are often brought up, but I don't feel like they are a solved problem from end user perspective. Too much setup and hassle to read random articles from random sites.