Websites costing single digit dollars per month can handle thousands of visitors. At the mom-and-pop level you're talking about it, just about anyone working a job capable of supporting themselves can afford to put up a website.

And yes, the default state of art is for nobody to care about it. The art we care about tends to be exceptional. That's why we care about it.

I'm not sure art is the exemplar you want to bring up. There's a reason that the "starving artist" is a meme. And, previous to modern times, art was largely a patronage-based business.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patronage#Arts

I never claimed earlier economic models for creative works were optimal either. :)

But I do think with today's increasingly short attention spans, the granularity of consuming creative works keeps going down, which makes the transaction friction more and more of a problem.

The issue is that it's too difficult for readers to have a subscription to everything. Someone needs to come in and make a voluntary content network. Add the extension to your browser and it tracks which sites you spend your time on. Content providers get a payout at the end of the month reflecting the value that readers/subscribers derived that month. If someone without a subscription accesses the page, it will be a) monetized by ads or b) available under a limited free readership ceiling, like WSJ/NYT do (content providers could potentially be incentivized with a larger portion of proceeds to choose this option).

I know there are a couple of people working on something similar to this on HN, because I've mentioned something like it a few times and they've replied saying they're working on it. ;) There was one in particular that I was following, but I remember when they launched there was a fatal flaw in their model (maybe it was bitcoin only? I don't remember). I don't recall the name now.

Sounds like Google Contributor https://support.google.com/contributor/answer/6286709?hl=en