I've encountered exactly that feature multiple times and I've never used it because god knows I'm not creating an account to give a site 0.99 and read an article. Friction.
Maybe if someone did it as a layer on top of news sites (like Google/FB login)... Maybe ...
That will create a ton of angry customers who had their cookies auto-deleted e.g. because of Incognito. Support costs will outweigh the few pennies earned.
Especially with a tech-ninded crowd, relying on the persistence of cookies is completely unworkable because of the large percentage of users with extensions that block or wipe cookies eagerly.
Maybe if someone did it as a layer on top of news sites (like Google/FB login)... Maybe ...