Fair enough, in this instance the author is the cofounder, so while I'll leave my comment to not hide that I've been corrected, he's well within his rights to charge for his work.

What gets me is the more and more I see of this: https://lemm.ee/comment/12593815, where The Atlantic paywalls an article copublished with the authors public blog.

People like Doctorow are fortunate to have built their followings before you could game Google, but I wish there was a way to identify sources of content to overcome that, and drive traffic and ad revenue to the source, vs revenue to them via an intermediary.