You have a lot of great answers here but an additional issue is payments being an unconsolidated network with high trust requirements, which adds a lot of frict

You have a lot of great answers here but an additional issue is payments being an unconsolidated network with high trust requirements, which adds a lot of friction to payment in aggregate if not for everyone. I would never bother to set up an account and then payment method to make the payment of 25c in the first place. I'd be trusting my information to a news network or some random syndication shop. Most everyone will be expecting an account set up, and then be using one of dozens of payment providers. It's just a news article, which these days are closer to blog posts. I don't exactly want one payment network to rule them all either, so in general I think that is just a currently unsolved problem.