There's your problem. Try sending 30 cents digitally in the US. We have so many vultures in the middle of our transactions that the standard online payment fee is 30 cents + 2.9%! Paypal has a microtransaction fee structure but then you're in the Paypal ecosystem.
I think if we can solve the microtransaction problem in the US we can move away from the ad / surveillance tech.
Most of the business models in the article seem to be based on micro-transactions (<1 USD) as a working model. The existence of such models derives from the fact that the payment systems in China are more sophisticated/efficient and you can make that 30¢ or even 1 RMB (16¢) transactions to buy a small piece of content. As you point out, that's not possible in the US thanks to the slowness of ACH and the high cost of Credit Card payments.
It's worth remembering that there was a meaningful ecosystem of app purchases (remember the golden age of 99¢ apps in the app store?) but that was supplanted for the most part by free to buy, ongoing monetization via ads.