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> From my understanding of things, the biggest thing in the way is that processing payments costs money.

The biggest problem is people don't want to pay much for contents. They have no problem paying $2/day for a cup of coffee but then taking about online contents they will talk about cents.

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People are willing to pay if it's made easy. The idea of Flattr (which soundd similar enough to what is proposed here) was that you top up your flattr account with let's say 20 usd and designate a monthly pay-out, let's say 5usd. This means that for the next 4 months flatter will pay out 5$ to creators you flattr, divided by the number of times the user clicked on the flatter button. If the user flattrs a lot of sites, then each site gets sth like 10cts. If they only click a few times, each site gets proportionally more of the 5$. The basic idea is that the user doesnt have to deal with thinking about exact amounts of money ("is this article really worth 50cts? Or should it be 2$?"). They set a monthly limit they are comfortable with spending on online content and it reaches the content creators they like. Unfortunately Flattr didn't really catch on in the USA, I think and is now largely irrelevant and I haven't followed its development since several years. (Anecdotally, it was quite big in the German podcasting scene...)

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