Yeah, I completely agree that the current system sucks.

There needs to be some universal way to conveniently pay small sums of money for viewing an article or watching a video.

It would be awesome if there would be some generally accepted system that allows you to embed a button on your website and accomplish that in one click.

Maybe it even exist, I'm not sure(if it does it's not widely accepted enough), also maybe there's more elegant and clever way of doing that. But to me it seems like a great startup idea, if someone could solve this problem a lot of people would be happy.