That's about what the current publishing sector take is now.
You're already paying more for this on a per-household basis through advertising, for lower-quality content (and killing off quality), with no say on the endpoint publisher revenue, through ad-supported media.
Households with higher income would pay more. Households with low income would have access to all the world's published knowledge.
That seems like an exceedingly equitable trade.
Also FT is not a US business.
... the notion of a market in which quality tiers are served based on bids based on perceived benefit and costs of provisioning might be one approach. Details naturally remain to be worked out.
But in the "clickbait" tier, if a GPT-3 ML/AI would be sufficient to supply a steady stream of memes, with sufficiently low negative social externalities, the profit motive for entering into the niche would remain quite low.
In-depth investigative journalism would be bid within a distinct an separate marketplace, sufficient to cover costs of production and maintenance.
In broadcast, SLAs can be achieved based on the portion of both spectrum (bandwidth) and time (a day still has only 24 hours, plus or minus the odd leap/skip second(s)), such that targets of specific levels of service could be required.
In print it's column-inches that are determinate, as well as circulation.
Online media shares some attributes of both, with measurements possible in both personal media time budgets (time/day or time/month spent on given sites or types of media), and in terms of article counts, word counts, above-the-fold visibility, SERP rankings, and ultimately of what Facebook apparently calls "prevalence" (items * views or presentations within the stream).
Another approach would be to open a specified number of journalist / creator slots and fund those to a living level (perhaps in addition to the consumption metric). As with many other complex work-products, very short-cycle quality metrics tend to be little better than noise. I believe Cathy O'Neill's written or spoken on this.
Clickbait would result in a low revenue tier.
I've fleshed this out in more detail, my proposal is substantially the same as others have proposed, including Phil Hunt (Pirate Party UK) and RMS, whom you may have heard something of recently, as well as mentions-in-passing by Joseph Stiglitz and others.
In rough order of significance:
A Modest Proposal: Universal Online Media Payment Syndication https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1uotb3/a_modes...
Why Information Goods and Markets are a Poor Match https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2vm2da/why_inf...
Repudiation as the micropayments killer feature (Not) https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/4r683b/repudia...
Specifying a Universal Online Media Payment Syndication System https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/2h0h81/specify...
The Medium Is the Message: how the technological and revenue environments shape content https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/278e2o/the_med...
Content Syndication: Phil Hunt's Broadband Tax / Content Compensation Fund proposal, and the Rent-Seeking Economy https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1vknhc/content...
Richard Stallman's "Internet Sharing" content syndication proposal (2012) https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/3p0bp6/richard...
What the academic publishing industry calls "theft" the world calls "research": Why Sci-Hub is so popular https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/4p2rwk/what_th... (References Stiglitz.)
Forbes asks: Why do programmers hate advertising so much? https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/24107v/forbes_...
Media, Advertising, Sustainability, Externalities, and Impacts: A light reading list https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/7k7l4m/media_a...
