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I think subscription-based instead of ad-based is the only way to monetize good content. It doesn't scale nearly as big (which is why companies like Meta will never go for it) and won't make any unicorns, but that's OK. An ad-based model will eventually pollute the platform no matter what esp as companies try to extract as much revenue as possible from it.

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I wish instant, frictionless micropayments was a thing, would love tip blogs, journalists, and other content creators directly without entering credit card info and risking my finances.

Brave Browser's BAT infrastructure is good for this; even if you don't want to manually tip people, you can set up auto-contribute amounts that deduct from the amount of BAT you earn from seeing ads monthly.

I think the habit of doing so (manually or automatically) sadly isn't there yet, because most conversations I see about Brave/BAT are "how much money can this make ME by earning BAT."

Subscriptions is what you see all the top tier journalistic sources pivoting towards as hard as they can. But to the sites who based their business on casual users coming in via SEO/Social it will never work. Arguably that's a good thing because it will end the bane of clickbait. But the cycle of clicking news links off of reddit or facebook is already locked in to too many consumers minds. The daily paper newspaper consumption seems ancient to young consumers. Good journalists need to be able to reach all the audiences immersed in social media, but also get them to form a habit of visiting their site directly regularly. Newsletters is a big help, but not a magic solution. Paywalls are popping up everywhere, but it's a real speedbump to acquisition.

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