Well, to be fair, Ted Nelson designed Xanadu so that everything would be automatic. The design called for everyone to have a single verified identity linked to their payment information, and they could both make and receive payments with automatically. If you copied and pasted (or transcluded, rather) content from one document to another, the authorship information would go with it (assuming that nobody cheated), and your viewers would pay both you and that other author when they viewed the resulting document.

I don’t think it would really work, but it wouldn’t be exhausting either. You wouldn’t have to put in your credit card number and address every time you viewed a document.

A pay for access to content model would really only work if it were frictionless. If you have to decide before you read, people would simply say no. If you pay after you read, people would probably say no, too.

On the other hand, in the before times, people paid by the minute to a network provider (such as Compuserve, Genie, AOL, etc) as well as to their phone company to get online. I might consider paying per minute to access some high quality journalism... But then again, probably not, I'm cheap.

If it was sufficiently cheap, perhaps 1 cent per view, you wouldn’t really have to think about it.

When I go to a supermarket, I easily make 50 purchase decisions.

It still happens. Google Play is more than happy to charge to your phone bill as an available payment method.