> It's true that any kind of pay-per-use would be a hard, hard sell, though. Who wants to have to think about whether every click is worth the nickel it's going to cost?
I've heard this argument before, but there's a common existence proof to the fact that it's possible: video games. People who play many different kinds of video games (RTS, MOBA, MMO, RPG) get used to making decisions as to whether to buy things many times an hour with barely any cognitive load - their brains just get used to working with smaller units of time and money.
And why shouldn't they? I found sources online that say that a YouTube video earns about $5 per 1k views, or 0.5c per view. If I have to pay half a cent to watch a video, even a short five-minute one, that's almost below the threshold of caring, and even those making median income are probably going to be constrained by the actual time that they have available to watch, rather than the cost of the videos. People will spontaneously spend $20 to go out to eat - after the initial adjustment to a micropayment system, they should have very little trouble spending 60 cents to watch YouTube for five whole hours after work, especially if the micropayment system has common-sense features such as clearly showing your wallet balance over time, how much you've recently spent, and how much longer your balance will last at your current rate of consumption.
Now, to be fair, the fact that it's possible, and that people will quickly get used to it after they spend some time with it, doesn't mean that people will be interested in trying it in the first place, and that's a much harder problem, because subscription services are more lucrative for companies. I think the only way to get micropayments off the ground would be a grassroots movement supported by a bunch of content creators making their stuff available on a micropayment platform. Otherwise, companies that move away from ads (e.g. Google) will just turn to subscription services to lock their users in.