There are transaction fees for most credit card purchases, and some of those fees have mandatory minimums (i.e. 2% plus 10 cents per transaction). This effecti

There are transaction fees for most credit card purchases, and some of those fees have mandatory minimums (i.e. 2% plus 10 cents per transaction). This effectively prevents immediate charging, so you end up needing to provide one of two services: either a tab-based model where you effectively loan your consumer content and trust that they will pay you, or a top-up model where they have to pay into an account in advance and they can eat away at that balance slowly. The tab-based model obviously fails because you can't stop people from registering new accounts over and over and never paying you. The top-up balance model is the most likely scenario to work, but will require people paying a "large" amount of like $10 per transaction. Skype uses this model. So then you have your problem with the "new account for each site". Well, I guess there's some sort of linking you could do, where a payment provider company like Square would enter into an agreement with each content provider to take 10% per transaction or something. Then you would just use single-sign on from your payment provider to login to these content provider sites.