I've always felt that we need some kind of ubiquitous and low friction micro transactions for small time websites to succeed and to move away from the ad driven model. A niche blog could be successful with a small audience if each of them donates a penny or two to read new stories. That way people are directly supporting content that they find useful, rather than having to create controversy to drive ads and clicks.
The problem with metered schemes is that they inhibit users who feel they are burning money every time they touch a page. It's kind of like having to pay by the megabyte every time you use your phone on the Internet.
What about a general subscription model that gets you access to a wide range of websites? The point is to have a fixed price for consumers so they can read as much as you want. Distributing the money to sites you visit is a backend problem.
That's what the Brave browser is doing: "Set up automatic micro-donations. Brave will automatically divide a monthly donation among the top sites you visit." (brave.com)
The downside is the high entry bar of installing a new browser and setting up a cryptocurrency wallet (payments are made with Basic Attention Tokens).
I would look at implementing this using some sort of SSO (single sign-on) scheme. That gets around the problem of having to install new client software.
One obvious problem with all such schemes is how to prevent actors from gaming the system, e.g., to get free logins for self + a bunch of friends. I
Coase's transaction cost theory of the firm seems to imply that low cost, ubiquitous transactions would lead to a reduction in the size of corporations generally, which might do something to redress the imbalance of power between individuals and corporations as well.
There is (was?) a service that did this. I had it on one of my blogs a few years ago. People could use it to donate as little as a penny, and the donate button appeared on each article.
I was very surprised how generous some people were. 10¢, 20¢, or more. But in the end, even with tens or hundreds of thousands of views, the article that got the most donations still only racked up about eight bucks.
The projects emerging to build a P2P Web bring an additional non-monetary reward system to this, which is that in return for publishing good content, you get readers/viewers who are willing to help offload server costs.
The naive implementation might work by simply reseeding, say, the Wikipedia articles you've already got in your browser cache to whomever is also interested in them.
There are also UI concepts, however, to give you fine control over how much and how long you're willing to help seed. (Like [1].)
The latter might end up being the currency of low-friction microtransactions that actually stands a chance of taking off. The downsides here are that it only helps in offsetting distribution costs, but it's not good for turning a profit (i.e., funding the creator's real life living situation). It might be fruitful to create a more fungible currency on these principles, though.
