[codycowan]

By breaking it down to pay per article vs. flat rate, you're missing the multiple alternative payment schemes possible with micropayments and massive scale. Just for starters think of the spotify model, where users are charged a flat rate, but their money is then paid out to artists based on the number of streams (or attention paid to each song).

But to your point about scamming, that is definitely a concern - but no more of a concern than aggregators and viral sites (think uproxx) are today.