Forcing people to sign up and pay for every article they read doesn't scale with the digital age. It could have been a solution back when the average person read say 3 physical newspapers and 5 physical magazines (made up numbers just to show the point), but now that the 30 articles one reads in a week could come from 30 different online publications, some of which could well be different the following week, the same solution doesn't scale anymore, and the money spent in commissions and taxes for all those micropayments could be significant. I don't say it's inherently bad per se, but that we could find options that scale better with the growing numbers of articles and publications we're exposed to.

Ironically, one of the best ways to monetize without actually have people moving money would be advertising; too bad it got rapidly out of control and what could have been say a page with 1/10 or its surface occupied by advertising is now filled with junk because there is no control over it, so people start using adblockers to remove it and we're soon back to square one.