Tell me: why is the first, highest-upvoted comment to every paywalled article posted on HN, actually just an archive.xx link that defeats that paywall? Coincidence?
It strikes me that writing quality content is not actually the challenge; people here certainly read paywalled content, for free, on the regular. Perhaps monetization is actually just really hard.
I'm certainly not going to subscribe to every service out there to get a variety of news, because it's cost prohibitive, and yet I'd like a variety, because high-quality content is so spread out. What I want, and what I suspect several others want, either isn't available or isn't easy to discover.
Given that subscriptions are generally more profitable for the provider, we should expect subscriptions to dominate over micropayments.
This argument is from https://www-users.cse.umn.edu/~odlyzko/doc/price.war.pdf and is one of the few economic analyses from the dawn of the web age that has proven truly prescient. To quote another of Odlyzko's papers from several years later, "Micropayments are the payment method of the future, and always will be."
Most articles aren't even worth a penny to read. There's just so much garbage out there.