When did the paid membership come in? Paywalls always cause huge declines in memberships and page views... Not sure what the alternative is - intrusive, tracking advertisements are, in the end, worse. One possibility is some sort of unified subscription service where one payment covers a large number of sites...
Other than very expensive sites (~$15-20 per month and up), I suspect the barrier to paid memberships is mostly yet another request for money, not the actual amount. Some major newspapers are expensive enough that the amount matters, and a lot of financial sites certainly are. Another category of expensive sites I find annoying is the moderately expensive ones that have a bunch of memberships that collectively get very expensive. There is one photography site that offers SEVEN separate memberships, and is broken up in such a way that many people will want at least a couple. They do offer a nearly 50% off discount for all seven, but that ends up being more expensive than either the Washington Post or the New York Times...
For modestly-priced sites like LuLa, though, it probably isn't the $1 per month (many of us spend more than that on coffee every day)... It's the "one more recurring charge", "one more thing that stores my credit card info", and "one more decision to make".
I pay four subscriptions - the expensive Times and Post, plus LuLa and The Athletic (I'm a huge Red Sox fan - hope that isn't a political statement to all the Yankee fans out there 😁). What keeps me from subscribing to other photography sites (apart from the very expensive one) or other baseball sites isn't the cost, it's not wanting more recurring charges.
If someone could offer a "photography bundle" that offered good value for something like $50 or even $100 per year, and removed the vast majority of paywalls and intrusive (audio, motion and tracking) ads from the photographic web, I suspect a lot of photographers might pay it. If a site or two declined to participate, I suspect they'd see their readership plummet.
I'd love to see a "newspaper bundle" headlined by theTimes, the Post and the Wall Street Journal plus a whole bunch of regional papers. Yes, each individual paper would see their revenue per subscriber go down, because they couldn't charge anything close to the aggregate price - but they'd all get revenue from a much wider subscriber base (and people who love newspapers wouldn't be paywalled when they wanted to see a few articles from an out-of-town daily that get linked by their hometown paper or a national paper).