I think a lot of people are willing to pay for a lot of things, as long as it's a low-friction affair. Which payments on the intertubez are not. As an example,

I think a lot of people are willing to pay for a lot of things, as long as it's a low-friction affair. Which payments on the intertubez are not. As an example, I recently wanted to read a newspaper article that was paywalled; so I figured I'd just pay. I ended up noping out after being presented with a form that wanted so much PII that it basically reeked of identity theft. This was Belgium's largest news site. If they'd have just given me an option to pay a one time fee of €0.50, no questions asked, no fuss, no PII, then I would have paid it in a heartbeat. Online payments suck and need to be addressed (way beyond what Stripe is doing). But many companies are basically gaming this broken system to force people into hard-to-cancel subscriptions, or are profiteering off of outrageous transaction fees (looking at you, PayPal).