How it worked out: if you notice something interesting and there’s a paywall, you forget about it and go back to whatever cat pictures you were browsing.
I'm vaguely for the idea of micropayments, as long they're actually micro (10⁻⁶). Even 10 cents for a piece of content seems somehow too much, because it all adds up. If we do the napkin math, large newspapers like the NYT might not be able to sustain themselves in that new world:
> 4500 (staff size) * 50000 (average yearly salary) / ~10M (audience) = $23 (required revenue per subscriber)
And this doesn't even account for office rent, travel expenses etc.
This is how most people think about software too, since FOSS started.
Then I discovered Unix/Linux and so it was the last piece of software I bought.