People have tried to get Micro-transactions off the ground many times - and failed every time (so far) - because Visa/MasterCard aren't interested - and getting

People have tried to get Micro-transactions off the ground many times - and failed every time (so far) - because Visa/MasterCard aren't interested - and getting people to change payment provider to use your thing is an impossible barrier to entry. So, no micro payments per page/episode/content chunk - that just leaves subscriptions. You pay a weekly/monthly/whatever fee for access to the thing. Getting people to subscribe to things is _also_ a huge barrier to entry. Getting people to subscribe to _lots_ of individual things is impossible (there's only so many subscriptions people are willing to have), so you get bundling & centralization - i.e. cable/netflix/patreon. Or you run ads.