Thanks for the reply, didn't know about Xanadu. Didn't come to think about Flattr.
> If any of them were successful, you wouldn't be asking this question
If you change from to: "successful" to "hugely successful in all English speaking countries" then I agree ... almost,
But there're also different continents and countries and different languages
... Which prompted me to now search for "Chinese micropayments" — and:
> "[the company's] growing profit margins are riding the wave of China's exploding media micropayment economy"
https://www.musicbusinessworldwide.com/tencent-music-uses-ti...
Reading a bit more on different sites: Apparently this started 5 years ago and has been working well, in China. Micropayments. A little bit I got the impression it's currently being used primarily for tipping.
There was a wave of micropayments startups about 6 years ago. The only one I remember is Flattr. The crypto bubble came and gave new hope because maybe the reason micropayments failed before was the credit card processing fees. Nope, still didn't work. I don't use Brave Rewards and have never heard of anyone making more than pennies with it.
Xanadu was one of the original visions of the internet from the 1960s. It sounded like a lot of the idealistic plans people come up with for micropayments where content creators can collect micropayments from viewers. Of course it didn't work.
Micropayments is an absolute cemetery of a business model.