It's basic stuff around loss aversion that's real and documented in real humans as opposed to homo economicus
Why wouldn't the same thing work for micropayments?
Click the link, pay $0.10. If you discover the headline was clickbait, or the writing was bad, or for any reason you didn't like it, click the "refund" button.
Yeah, a few people will abuse this and just refund everything. Retailers have solved this problem, too. People with a refund rate more than 2 sigma from the mean don't get refunds on that site anymore.
It's not worth the time. People don't want to make decisions about quantifying if something was worth $0.10 of enjoyment. They'll just go elsewhere to slightly worse but totally (guilt-)free content.
FWIW i have no problem installing a micropayment plugin in Chrome that is connected to my credit card, and paying $.05 or something if I find an article I enjoy. I say this -- but I'm terrified of what future that will bring to the internet. Where now everything is behind a micro-paywall.
I feel like it couldn't be worse than the current situation where everything is "free" = ad-funded. Especially when those ads are consolidated under few giants.
Mind you, this is insanely successful for a writer.
Even still, if on Medium, 3% of people who read my articles are willing to pay $0.25 for them -- I'd make about about $600.
TBH, I'd rather not bug my readers for that little bit of money.
Turned out ads were a nice middle ground for most people on most sites. Most ads were boring banner ads. Most people could ignore them. I wasn't hustling for pennies. People who couldn't pay didn't have to. People didn't have to grapple with loss aversion for visiting a website. The model had issues, but it worked.
Now that ad-blocking is ubiquitous, I'm left running my sites (chiefly, a large forum) as a charity. Unless something changes, the internet will soon be centralized corporation-run megasites like Reddit/Facebook... and then the few charity sites run by individuals who can find a niche not dominated by the former.
I don't see a replacement for ads on the horizon. Micropayments still don't work. Nobody wants to have that "will it be worth it?" anxiety every time they click a link. Not every website on the internet can erect its own paywall. Even if you're in the rare position to negotiate private ad deals, then you're probably big enough to get your own entry on Easylist.
As I speak, there's a frontpage submission lamenting the death of individual/smaller sites and weirdness on the internet. There's much more death to come.