There are a few things at play afaict:

- the dominant form of payment online, credit cards, are ill-suited to small, one-time payments
   - high UX onboarding costs
   - high transaction fees relative to transaction size
- recurring revenue is better for business
   - most of these auto-recur and people forget to cancel them
   - you can monetize mediocre content that no one would pay for directly and mediocre content is more common
   - you can forecast your earnings
- people tend to do what everyone else is doing and assume there's good reason they aren't doing otherwise, and most people aren't doing pay-per-read

k00b

It may work. But paywall projects on Lightning haven't taken off. 
There may be different models though I described one here https://notgeld.medium.com/there-is-no-dispute-4c78d93555f8

notgeld

xxxxxxx

This seems like such an easy revenue generating action for media companies to take. What gives?

If a user pays to read the article, they are almost certainly going to be much more engaged than the average user as they have paid to read the article. So they could on-sell this audience for higher CPM’s. So it’s basically a win-win.

lightning

This seems like such an easy revenue generating action for media companies to take. What gives?

If a user pays to read the article, they are almost certainly going to be much more engaged than the average user as they have paid to read the article. So they could on-sell this audience for higher CPM’s. So it’s basically a win-win.