It is free the moment you put it out there for free. That's the nature of content in electronic format: once you put it out, it's not your anymore and people will simply not pay. Why would they?
It boggles my mind, this insistence that people somehow have an obligation to pay for stuffs that's made available for free, voluntarily, or that they have to pay a certain fixed amount, but without explicitly making them do so by putting a price on the access to that content. If you feel you deserve 1 dollar instead of 1 cent for a piece of content, have the courage to paywall it.
V4V has all the incentives upside down and will never, ever, "work", if "work" means paying as much to the content creator as they would get from a paywalled system.