The reason why it solves clickbait vs investigative journalism is because its an apportioned revenue share. click bait is easy to write and has more competition if a user reads loads of clickbait the revenue the author makes from that user will be low per article. On the other hand if you have a user who reads "investigative" high brow content its more expensive so there is less of it so you would expect the per user revenue would be much higher per view.
Imagine if spotify paid artists based on minutes listened apportioned based on each users listening habits instead of a fixed rate of N cents per listen.
So one user listens to Nirvana exclusively all month on spotify you would expect 100% of the 70% rev share to go to the owners of that nirvana content.
How do we decide that "high quality" content gets more per view than "low quality" content? We would need a human who makes subsidy decisions. Or if it's just an equal split of each user's monthly payment, then:
* I'm not sure that readers of "high quality" content read fewer articles in total,
* I'm not sure that they completely avoid clickbait, maybe just read a bit of "high quality" in addition to the "low quality" ones. Often I just read comments on HN or browse pictures on reddit instead of a long thoughtful article, because after a long day of work that feels more relaxing,
* The number of people who click on those articles is still going to be a small fraction of the whole population.
So, this can finance a small number of national or even global sites with sufficient readership. Just like the Economist, New York Times, Washington Post, etc still survive on advertising revenue today.
But how do we make sure every small 20k population town weekly paper can afford similar articles on local issues? How do we encourage or guide people to actually read them instead of looking pictures of cats? How do we make a "good for you classical music collective" get paid 10x more than Nirvana when everyone wants to listen to Nirvana?
Imagine if spotify paid artists based on minutes listened apportioned based on each users listening habits instead of a fixed rate of N cents per listen.
So one user listens to Nirvana exclusively all month on spotify you would expect 100% of the 70% rev share to go to the owners of that nirvana content.