If your phrasing were where this is going I'd have no issues with it, but I think (if this is successful) it's going to be much worse:

"The idea is to create experiences that ... are targeted and clickable enough for brands to actually make money and potentially avoid using a paywall altogether."

The most likely use case is to make pop-over ads 100x more annoying, not to complement a paywall. I would hope user revolts would kill this, but I'm not optimistic...