How it worked out: if you notice something interesting and there’s a paywall, you forget about it and go back to whatever cat pictures you were browsing.

Well... yeah. Why would I pay for something on the Internet? We've all been conditioned that text content (at least, and also music and videos to some extent) should be available for free, and ads can be blocked.

I'm vaguely for the idea of micropayments, as long they're actually micro (10⁻⁶). Even 10 cents for a piece of content seems somehow too much, because it all adds up. If we do the napkin math, large newspapers like the NYT might not be able to sustain themselves in that new world:

> 4500 (staff size) * 50000 (average yearly salary) / ~10M (audience) = $23 (required revenue per subscriber)

And this doesn't even account for office rent, travel expenses etc.

> Why would I pay for something on the Internet?

This is how most people think about software too, since FOSS started.

They have always thought that way about software. All my early-childhood games (even on the Commodore 64) came from copied floppy disks. In my teens I bought my own games, but those were always group-buys: I had copies of all the games my friends bought too, and they had copies of mine.

I don't know. I remember paying for the Borland C compiler, which was quite a lot of money for a teen (like $600 IIRC).

Then I discovered Unix/Linux and so it was the last piece of software I bought.

that describes my experiences. If my interest is high enough then i'll go through the various settings to disable the paywall. Once, and only once so far, I bought a pdf about a particular type of rocket engine that i couldn't get out of my head.