It's easier to put an ad than to ask the visitor for money. Imagine the possibility of creating feedback with automatic micro-payments!
And most creators would love to keep their content open for everyone, but not have icky ads cluttering up their content.
I think you are underestimating how much micropayments will iron out a lot of problems for a lot of people.
Host your own scrapbook page (er, Facebook) for penny's without ads, tracking, manipulative promotion of content... People lose sight of the fact that Facebooks massive server farms are not really there to serve little posts, but to track and make predictions about people.
Those are just two ways
Another is people learning to support many causes they believe in with very small regular donations. I would voluntarily pay 1/10 cent for every wikipedia page I looked at, or 10 cents a week. Doesn't seem like much but that's $5.20 a year painlessly given.
Enough people do that and they could stop their annual funding drive.
They would also have just got an even clearer incentive to up the quality and usefulness of what they do. Greater efforts resulting in greater donations directly.
I don't know that an article is quality until I am done reading it. I already paid for my ISP, my electricity, and my computer equipment. I'm spending my finite amount of time reading it. Why would I pay extra for the privilege? Unless I will materially gain from reading it, i.e. "here's a discount code for your next month's ISP bill", I'm just gambling 1/10th of a cent that I might get some sort of emotional contentment reading an article.
Even if the content of the article is good, what if the presentation sucks making it physically difficult to read. For my 1/10th of a cent am I getting an easily accessible form of the content? If I want to read the content again will I have to pay another 1/10th of a cent? If my 1/10th of a cent for a single page view or a full read of the content, if the host breaks up an article over multiple pages am I paying for each one? Can I freely download and use the content within the bounds of Fair Use? What are the full terms of my transaction?
While you're trying to make the case for some trivial amount of money, if everyone is asking for a trivial amount of money then in aggregate it's no longer a trivial amount for users. If I can't get a refund if an article sucks then I am not interested. If a website has to potentially give refunds to users then they won't be interested.
Even with micro-transaction payments websites have the same perverse incentives to get traffic as ones that run advertisements. The more traffic they get the more money they make. Content producers will also eventually require some sort of onerous DRM to make sure that every single view of some bit of content is paid for with a micro-transaction.
People are used to accessing text and video on the web for free. You and I may have a paid subscription to a Patreon or newspaper, but in both cases we are not paying piecemeal.
Many people would love to auto pay 1 or 2 cents a page view, to no longer see ads.
It might take a while, but I think eventually most people not in financial hardship will be happy to do that. (And people in financial hardship are not the best people to put ads in front of.)
Send us an email: support@Premiuum.net
Tell us about your specific use case, and we'll be happy to get you sorted.
Cheers.
