> There's nothing preventing a newspaper charging 10$ once to pre-pay your account and each visit debits the equivalent of their ad earnings for that page view.

Sure there is, they'd lose enormous money that way. Because the small segment of users that would pay for the average page view are a large portion of the users most valuable to advertisers.

If they charged high enough to make up for the loss of the demographic willing to pay the price, it would be an even smaller group paying very high prices. And even higher prices once you charged extra to recover the costs of developing and maintaining the separate payment and customer support system and service for that small customer base.

Lots of people that are in demographics more valuable than average see stats about the average a site makes per view (or per MAU, or whatever) and says “I'd be willing to pay more than that.”

What they don't realize is that they are worth more than that as advertising targets, and the people that bring the average down to what it is aren't willing to pay the average.

In this case the solution is regulation that makes targeted advertising unprofitable (like the GDPR) so that advertising is out of the question and payment is the only way to fund the website. Since payment is the only option, there is no more way to price-discriminate based on willingness to pay and they need to keep the prices down to stay competitive. Everyone wins.