If you want to smarm about a better business model, I invite you to find it yourself. It's much easier to perform that smarm than find one, but I guess if you have to rationalize free ridership it's a good line. And it means you don't have to come to grips with the idea that it's a social problem instead of a free-market-hallowed-be-thy-name problem; it does mean you can mostly wave away that the money needs to come from somewhere and every scalable option involves advertising that free-riders block, native advertising that compromises the integrity of the work (if it's applicable at all), or requiring payment that readers won't pony up for. (Yes, really, every option, you're welcome to bookmark this post and cheetodust about it if one ever comes to fruition but I am comfortable betting my side of the line.)
Fixing the country, though, is ssssocialism, and we can't have that. Instead people who entertain us should beg for scraps, I suppose. That's sustainable.
I claim that part of it at least is a technical problem.
No, really. Compare user payment habits on desktops/websites versus mobile devices. Sure, there are the issues that users have become attuned to $1 apps, that many are incredibly reluctant to pony up even that, etc. etc. But at least some users pay $1, because it only requires a few taps and the purchase is associated with their existing $devicevendor account; good luck getting that to happen on the web, where not everyone has PayPal (to which the most common alternative is pulling out a physical wallet and filling in a long list of text boxes) and you need to make your own account system.
What would the web be like if micropayments had actually become a thing?
I suppose it depends when those micropayments had become a thing. I don't think, for example, that the various "pay a sliver of money when you hit a page" services out there have any chance, nor would they have had a chance five years ago. Content on the internet is Free, and when it's not Free, it's time to get boiling and resentful.
Ten years ago, fifteen? Maybe. At this point I feel like the entitlement of free ridership has won pretty hard.
