I remember when the angry mob, lead by the Penny Arcade guys came after Scott McCloud for advocating the end of the ad funded Internet in favor of a micropayment driven one.
I don't think micropayments can work, either. The vast majority of Internet content—and I mean stuff that does get seen, not obscure sites with a dozen visits a years—isn't even worth a penny to most (not all, but most) of the people who "consume" it, but is worth a lot more than micropayment-amounts to some smaller set of people. Enforcing micropayments wouldn't, for nearly all sites that rely on ad revenue now, result in direct monetization of their reader/viewership, but in a large drop in audience (and then a scramble to better-monetize those who remain).
For most people, the alternative to browsing most of what they look at on, say, their phone day-to-day, if it vanished, isn't to pay for more content (maybe a little... but mostly it won't be the same content) but to, IDK, play the Nokia Snake Game. The value is nearly nonexistent, for most visitors.
I think micro-payments could work in many different ways and with much different results depending on which model becomes prevalent. But the issue is mostly that it has to both "work" once there's enough users and it has to have a mechanism for adoption even before it is "big enough".
Example of alternative for micro-payment model: You pay $20 to an intermediary each month. You upvote web pages/domains. Pages you visit knows you pay $20 each month but not whether you upvote them. At the end of the month, the $20 gets equal split between web pages you upvoted.
It's a very imperfect model that probably wouldn't get spontaneously adopted. But there's many ways it could be varied. And saying it won't work feels a bit too categorical because are we really saying no possible variant of this will ever work?
Yes, I really think that all of this is both more money and more effort than a very high proportion of page-views on the web are valued by the person causing the page-view. I think there are implementation challenges to making a good system for micropayments, but also that solving all of them perfectly still won't get you a healthy micropayments ecosystem, because most of the web browsing that generates ad dollars has a value to the browsing user that is incredibly low.
In a field of thousands of interchangeably-identical but pretty poppies, would you pay a tenth of a penny to have one more poppy out there? How about a hundredth of a penny? No, it'd be of so little value to you that even a split-second of time spent contemplating the question vastly exceeds its value. The trouble is that most browsing isn't discriminating—acceptable alternatives include almost anything else (as in my Nokia Snake Game example—it's just killing time, and some options might be preferable to others but the difference is extremely tiny).
The only way it could work is if you somehow got almost the entire Web to opt in and start blocking non-micropaying users, such that very little at all was browsable on the Web without going through the trouble of setting this up and it was basically just a second ISP bill. I don't think that's possible unless a full ban on Web advertising were to happen, not just on spying ad-clearinghouses, but also on traditional ads. Then... maybe, but I still wouldn't bet on it working out.
Paid content does work, but it has to aim at addressing the small slice of the audience for whom your content is worth a lot more than a micropayment and getting whole dollars out of them, not pennies or fractions of pennies.
The only place anything like micropayments has kinda worked over a whole medium-category is music. What does that look like?
1) There's a clear legal framework and licensing scheme around music that is broadly adhered-to, and existing, well-established organizations to deal with to get it all sorted out.
2) There's little exclusivity of content, which lets competition at service quality & convenience take center stage and keeps competitors on their toes (very unlike video streaming...)
3) People do care to have access to particular content. They care a lot, when it comes to music, and indeed, many spend much of their time listening to the same songs, albums, and artists over an over. They do not find a random playlist of free music from Soundcloud or whatever to be at all an acceptable replacement, even if it's all in genres they like.
4) ... and yet, this scheme sees constant criticism of not making any notable money for all but the very, very top of the pile. It's not a significant income stream for the vast majority of artists, even those who do make a living at music. Their income still has to be made up elsewhere (remember that "small slice of your audience to whom your work is way more valuable than micropayments"?) And this is the closest thing we have to a working example of micropayments, and it is in fact a functioning micropayment market of sorts. It still, arguably, isn't very good.
Ah. Yes, that's certainly true, both due to the nature of what ads are, and how that business model affects the relationship between creator and audience.
Turns out, he was right!