Yes but that had nothing to do with tracking, it was just the nature of the medium. I would like to agree with your idea of tracking as payment, but I really can't, because:

a) Most of the time I don't have a choice. There's no option to pay them money and even if I pay them directly, they may still keep collecting tons of personal information about me on top of it.

b) It's sneaky. I don't really know what information they have and how they use it. I just have a couple of completely meaningless words from their privacy policy.

c) I don't know the price I'm paying.

The last point is the most important one. The value and the risk associated with a particular piece of information greatly depends on what other information it is combined with, but I can't control that. The company could get acquired tomorrow by some ad behemoth that knows a lot of other things about me, so the price I'm paying could change after the fact. That's not the way payment works. I have to know the price I'm agreeing to pay before I enter that contract.