I would love to pay a penny an article read by me my AI or whatever to a host of services provided they could prove the value first. These days I'm told which thousand companies my clicks will be sold to any time I visit an article, and that's before I've gotten value.
Plenty of startups have tried the “penny per article” approach and failed. They might get 20% of the penny on behalf of the publisher - who has to get 1M pageviews to get $10k.
Hard to build a business that requires changing user behavior on pennies. Seriously, make the math and strategy work - requires a Herculean effort to hit ramen profitability for all involved.
The industry got it wrong when it digitized