> No one’s successfully done this because when they do they want to individually price articles

But different articles are worth different amounts of money. You can't really escape that fact. If a news org has spent three months doing a deep dive into political corruption and created a blockbuster report on it, in what world can it be justified for that to be the same price as someone recapping last night's episode of Survivor? This is all covered in the article I linked to.

> Implement a legitimate system

By whose definition of legitimate is the question, I guess. I think it's very easy to stand on the outside and say "duh, just do it the right way!".

It's not like things haven't been tried.

- Blendle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blendle

- Scroll: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scroll_(web_service)

- Google Contributor: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Contributor

- Axate: https://www.axate.com

- Coil (to an extent): https://coil.com/

All these people tried to solve this problem and weren't able to.

Then don’t put the more expensive articles as accessible for $0.50. Keep them behind the subscription. Users with subscriptions are the only ones who really want to read longer articles anyways.