Just for your interest, I worked for a company that believed micro-payments was the way to pay for content on the internet in the late 1990s. It was called Qpass. The idea was that you could buy some credits, and use your Qpass at any of the sites in the network to pay for specific articles. Qpass wasn't able to make that model work at the time.

Qpass ended up pivoting to helping wireless carriers with flexible billing solutions for digital content.

[1] http://www.seattlepi.com/business/article/Qpass-sold-for-275...