Do people actually buy research articles?
I tried digging through the 2013 annual report of Elsevier. Under &quot;Revenue&quot; (page 111) they list both &quot;subscriptions&quot; and &quot;transactional&quot; - but the latter include not only reprints, but also books etc.

As you can see, even if we lump books and reprints together, it is still less than subscriptions.
To get a more complete answer you may have to ask them directly.