And that's probably around the price point that people mean by micropayments. It's not $1 per article. And that's probably an exhausting amount of mental transaction costs as Clay Shirky observed ages ago and probably not a sustainable revenue stream for producers.

For consumers, a subscription model seems to fit the bill for most people but some media are apparently better suited than others.

True, but that’s made possible by the aggregator (the publisher who’s printed the magazine)

This dream of eliminating that middle-person is still a dream.

My dream is for ~5c micropayments, where the money goes either goes to the publisher or a charity depending on if I liked it after the fact. Basically fighting low quality clickbait without the publisher being able to tell which I specifically did.