If it was they would say so as that would not be seen as nefarious.

Part of me likes the idea of the price being set by how much you read, but the increasing amount of clickbait would probably make such a scheme not a good thing. I used to look at Google's news feed on my phone at times--lots of stuff that was clearly ads pretending to be articles but mostly you could pick out the interesting stuff. Now, though, very often the "interesting" stuff turns out to be AI garbage that doesn't actually say what it says it says.