I wish there was an easy way to make micropayments for articles, in the vein of Amazon's one-click feature. Go to an article, hit a paywall, click a shiny ¢5 button, done. If the micropayment was small and I didn't have to enter my CC info more than once, I'd do it all the time. Unfortunately, this would be contrary to the way commerce works on the internet today. In order to maintain security, it would probably have to be the browser, not a third-party service, that handles your CC information. A new browser commerce protocol would have to be created, and every platform vendor would have to support it. So it would probably never happen.

> I fear that since things have been free for 20+ years, people aren't going to ever pay for written content.

Advertising really muddles everything and makes content feel "free", even though it's clearly not. Content producers should do a better job of making it clear that if users don't pay, they won't get their content.