> We should revive the micro payments feature that where built into very early browsers.
I don't think this was ever a thing. I know there's HTTP 402 and before 2000 there were some standards around payment being pursued but AFAIK nothing ever made it into browsers. Or am I missing something?
Paywalling with extremely easy, one-click payment of very small amount might work. Paywalling does still incentivize things like misleading, sensationalized click-bait titles, but that's pretty much the norm everywhere.
Alternatively, if there was a subscription that covered a massive amount of blogs/news bundled into one low-cost subscription, that might also work. What I heavily doubt is if donation-based micropayments will ever find enough users to remain profitable.
If you have a wallet configured to pay a microtransaction for each day you browse to a certain site (of for x # of page loads, although that could incentivize strange web site behavior to increase the number of pages a reader goes to while they visit), then your wallet pays the small payment when you first browse to the page and you get an ad-free experience.
Otherwise, ads or a subscription paywall, depending on how the site wants to manage revenue.
And it was a fine goal, but BAT did so many shady things (like blocking ads but then showing brave's own ads), and the PR poison that is anything cryptocurrency, meant that it was ultimately doomed to fail.
It has never worked and will never work. What has been proven to work is syndication, ie putting a giant amount of content behind a single paywall. Like Spotify, Netflix, Cable TV, other streamers do. Text publishers could easily do that if they wanted to. But it needs to be extremely broad, and not decided by ideological leanings or snobbery and such.