I think the goal needs to be to remove the "micro" from micropayment schemes.

At some point, the overhead of managing and tracking payments takes up a major part of its value.

Federation is the potential counter-argument. Let me buy one USD20 per month subscription that covers a huge swath of media. Divide the revenue among publishers based on aggregate metrics.

Then you're dealing with only relatively large and infrequent transactions-- consumers paying $20 per month, the aggregator paying each publisher a monthly cut of $100 or $100,000-- something that doesn't require a completely new financial ecosystem to make viable.

Making it a fixed-dollar subscription helps with risk-aversion. If you're buying 200 other media products in the same subscription, you can avoid second-guessing "will I use this?" It avoids any client-side "I have to consciously specify what I want to back" friction like Patreon.

I think a Brave-style approach is better than an advertising-supported model just because Internet advertising is a scam for everyone involved. Unfortunately Brave doesn't solve the underlying problem of "views = $$$", which means journalism would have to continue to rely on being clickbait to survive.

It does make an effort to solve the problem. It currently uses a time based approach in which tokens are credited to a publisher based on time spent by the user reading the article.

Also there is a threshold of some seconds before any tokens are accounted for an article. So basically click baits won’t account for any tokens because the user might quickly close the article.