[FWKevents]

I agree with you, but, unfortunately, research shows that only 5% of customers care that their privacy is being sold off. The rest don't care. Accuweather, for instance, (which is so lousy with ads that it compromises the experience of using the app,) offered a deal where you could pay $5/year and not be tracked or have ads. I took advantage of the offer. But so few others did that Accuweather cancelled the service. I guess it wasn't worth their trouble to keep track of who had paid and so didn't get ads for less than 5% of their users to sign on.

[bcrl]

I too won't bother to sign up for a $5 per year subscription to a website, as the pain of a potential credit card compromise is more than the $5/a subscription is worth. That's why I think it needs to go via a browser / ISP based system. Using credit cards is simply too much friction for micropayments. Give me one place to signup that covers the majority of websites that I use and it's a completely different value proposition.