This is because there are free alternatives. When 99% of the articles on the frontpage are freely accessible, it feels "wrong" to find an article that requires you to cough up money first, especially when it does not hold up to the insane quality level implied by that price difference.
If there were no free search engines, I can see people paying a few bucks a month for Google. Even more so if Google would then again make their results as useful to users as they once were.
A practical example: I'm incredibly price-sensitive wrt productivity applications because there are many great such applications available as open source. I'm much less price-sensitive when it comes to video games (e.g. I spent 300€ on Breath of the Wild since it required buying a Switch) because the selection of open source video games is very limited.
If there were no free search engines, I can see people paying a few bucks a month for Google. Even more so if Google would then again make their results as useful to users as they once were.
A practical example: I'm incredibly price-sensitive wrt productivity applications because there are many great such applications available as open source. I'm much less price-sensitive when it comes to video games (e.g. I spent 300€ on Breath of the Wild since it required buying a Switch) because the selection of open source video games is very limited.