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.