The idea is that you get paid based on how many people visit your site. There should probably be significant bonuses based on sign ups coming from/through your site.
So imagine I'm the New York Times. OK, I can charge people $1 to read the NYT. If I was Joe Shmoe, my revenue share from that $1 would have been fifty cents. However, since I'm the freaking NYT and generating more accounts than everyone else on the system, the network bumps my payout to 80 cents. Whee!
Wait, absense of whee. Its my content that was worth the dollar to the user. Why should I give twenty cents to Joe Shmoe?
And without the NYT on board, Joe Shmoe's Blog About Things You're Not Quite Willing To Pay For But Are Glad Exist On The Internet is screwed.
Aren't forgetting the page view element of contenture? I think payment is driven by page views not sharing.
I think their strongest conversion point would be getting rid of adds. If I realized that a few of the sites I visit almost daily and get linked to me regularly would all magically have no adds if I signed up for a service, I might do it. It's not that I'm paying for a service from a website, I'm paying to get rid of an anti-service: the ads.
All that said, I have NoScript, AdBlockPlus, and RemoveItPermanently installed on almost all my computers.
I honestly don't see the point of browsing with NoScript in this day and age. Don't you get tired of every website having broken features? Without javascript, for example, you wouldn't even be able to see the comments on my blog. On my businesses' website, we've made an assumption that if you're browsing with NoScript, you're probably one of the 2% of users who's going to scream and shout about Flash too, so we don't consider you part of the market of potential users.
Javascript is essential to the web experience in 2009.
Here's the fundamental problem with this advertising venture: everybody in the ecosystem freeloads on the site that makes the "sale". (Convinces a user to pay $X for access to the content on that site "and by the way get access to all these other sites, too!") This makes a lot of sense for, e.g., Paypal.
Quick aside on how Paypal works: everybody else in the ecosystem freeloads on eBay, because eBay is far and away the #1 source of Paypal accounts and every marginal Paypal account helps every other Paypal merchant. However, a user signing up for a Paypal account in your checkout funnel sucks for conversion. Ideally, you'd want to get new accounts generated by other businesses but never have to pay the "new account" tax yourself. However, since Paypal makes a cut of all transactions and eBay makes a huge direct profit for every additional account they sign up, it makes sense for eBay to grossly subsidize the rest of the ecosystem. (Plus, they can control it such that you can't play in their ecosystem without paying the new account tax.)
OK, now take this to content businesses: remember, everyone freeloads off the site that wins the account -- you don't have to convince an existing account to open their wallet again, you merely need to attract their eyeball. But users don't perceive value from "Get access to X... and, by the way, a bunch of other sites you might not care about and we won't list right now". They're willing to pay for X. If you're X, where X is presumably something massive like the New York Times or deeply meaningful to users like, I don't know, HN would be, and you know people will pay you money for your content, why the heck would you offer to split that money with other people who are not sharing appreciable amounts of money with you? (Because you're massively bigger and better monetized than them, you directly generate far more accounts in the system -- losing money, brand value, and user attention on each -- than you receive from, e.g., my site which has 50k visits a month.)
Ecosystems based on freeloading don't work unless the equilibrium is such that all players benefit from the freeloading. In this system, the players which you need to enable the freeloading are greatly disadvantaged by it. Sucks to be them. Accordingly, they won't sign up, and without them there is no ecosystem to speak of.