Does anyone actually sell stock photography on that basis? I can honestly say that I have never encountered such a thing, and I've bought rights to use images, including stock photography, on numerous occasions.

Getty and all the premium stock sites do (for certain collections).

When I worked in the agency world, most of our clients' budgets were a bit too tight for rights-managed photography (RM is generally more expensive on top of being more restrictively licensed), but when we did, there was usually a fairly simple set of web form selects for publication type, duration of publication, audience size, etc.