I do see what you mean, but it works for me today for things like movies.

Pay per use does work reasonably for movies and music. Arguably those aren't really micropayments though. And all you can eat subscriptions for most available content (in the case of music) and some available content (in the case of moviews & TV) is pretty popular as well.

True micropayments would be more like paying a nickel to read an article. All we can say is that this has been talked about for at least 15 years and it hasn't happened. [1] Some sort of subscription that pooled a bunch of sources might work. The ones I've seen around magazines aren't nearly comprehensive enough though.

[1] http://www.openp2p.com/lpt/a//p2p/2000/12/19/micropayments.h...

I assume, if this kind of content got to the point that most of the good stuff was behind a paywall that some sort of review system would spring up.

Hopefully it would be more granular than just at the website level, perhaps being able to drill down to a specific journalist / category / article / whatever.

Maybe that feedback loop would shape things in a way that I would be more willing to subscribe to a entire publication vs cherry picking individual authors or content.