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.
Why? why do most B2B companies prefer subscription based pricing? Because it brings in predictability you can run a business on. Micro-transactions only work in utility context (electric, water, cloud compute). You can't run a news company on micro-transactions.
Let's say that you could get 2 % of these people to pay you $10 per month. With a readership of 1M that would mean you'd get (1000000 * 0.1 * 0.02) * 10 * 12 = $240k per year.
Now let's move that over to blendle, let's say that the average reader reads 1.2 articles per month (since most people only look at 1 article). Let's be super generous here - with a much larger conversion rate - 10 % of everyone buying 1 article per month month on average comes up to a comparable amount 100000 * 12 * 0.23 = $276k per month. And we're being generous here, remember - blendle abandoned this model so it almost certainly isn't equal to the metered model I used in my estimation above even if more users are willing to pay.
Now if you bring down the payment to whatever you're proposing you get to $27.6k or even 2.76k per YEAR. The napkin math is clear that this isn't feasible.
Interestingly enough you'd pay less as a "heavy reader" if you read 10 articles per month (which is a super small % of users on an average medium) with blendle (10 * 0.23 = $2.3) than with a subscription costing $10. But making the users count articles likely isn't great psychology as compared to buy and read everything you want. Which likely is perceived as a higher value offer.