The micro-transaction proposals everyone cried about in the early 2000's would have been so much better than this.
The odds of me paying for a subscription for some tiny local newspaper on the other side of the country are literally nil, but I'd be far more willing toss you a penny or two to read the content of a single article.
I can see some number of people are happy to pay a few cents to read something. I'm guessing it's a minority, but hey it's something.
Problem though is that the first transaction is really expensive in time and effort. Download the payments app, sign up, register credit card, seed the account, install browser extension etc. All this assuming I know the payments system exists and assuming there's only 1 of them.
So what was the article about? How could it possibly be enticing enough to make it worth this hassle?
Sure, the second and later times it's easy (assuming the same micro-service is used, and assuming the paywall supports micro at all) but I never bother with the first so this gain is never there.
the problem is of course that outside of china we don't have that dominance of a single app that everyone already has. and we would need to build something federated to drive adoption, which is hard. (mobile payment in china is not federated. alternatives to wechat only work because of the country's huge population and because they are also popular for other reasons, like alibaba which was eventually able to build alipay because of that. and of course alibaba doesn't accept wechat pay.)
i think a key feature for wechat pay gaining popularity was that it allows people to send money to each other, and therefore it was not dependent on service providers adopting it. it probably also helped that china has a culture of giving money as a gift.
another approach is mobile money https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_Money which apparently is popular in africa.
There is an EU initiative (Wero) to unify payment methods at least across the EU, but that's far from finished. Because this system directly integrates with banks, EU citizens won't need to download a separate app to store money in (or connect your bank account to); just the standard banking app you probably have on your phone already will do. It would make integrating micropayments for a large part of Europe very easy.
On the other hand, you'd still need to pay per transaction as a business (a flat fee or a percentage or a combination of both, depending on your bank), so you wouldn't get €0.05 news articles. Without a method to aggregate these payments, traditional banking will still be quite dead.
In truth, I don't think people will pay for news even if it's just one click of a button. People don't value news all that much, and the shady propaganda machines make a lot of "news" available for free, a rate no real newspaper can compete with.
simply sending money from my bank account would also not be practical. the whole point is that you can make small payments need to be fast without any security checks. online banking does not (and should not) allow that with your regular online banking account. there needs to be a separate app with a limited wallet that can't do anything but make small payments until the wallet is empty.