Humans pay more though. Nobody will be interested in collecting 1c from hundred million of unloyal readers, prone to changing information providers because then they aren't chained with a yearly sub which can be only cancelled via an international 2-3 hour call to the USA for the price of a whole sub. Journal would sooner get that money from the loyal 100000 readers who will pay 1$ per article. But wait, why do that when they can change 10-20$ per article from 10000 and throw some meaningless loyalty program to them?

Even better, do the american healthcare trick - set a price at say 1000$ per article but allow only big corpos to have some opaque bulk discounts for their employees. Thus maximizing money extraction from richest customers.

How many ads will there be, though?

Also, ads aren't paying everyone's bills -- hence the paywalls -- so that number must be too low.

(Not to mention the other issue with this: in general it's not ads or micropayments/paywalls -- it's ads and micropayments/paywalls. Hell, if micropayments were feasible, it would probably be all three.)