The problem with micropayments is nontrivial.
In order to make micropayments work, you need to
1. have some sort of personal money-holding folder (it's so hard to avoid the word 'wallet' here), that you can easily fill (e.g. via your credit card). This moneyholder needs to be sufficiently safe for use, and should be password-protected. Ideally, it's a function or tightly integrated with your browser.
2. The website itself needs a moneyholder, though this could conceivably be implemented with limited functionality.
3. An easy to implement way to have small transactions from your moneyholder to the moneyholder of a website. To avoid creating issues around money laundering, the maximal height or a daily limit for transaction to one destination could be considered.
4. A legal way to retrieve funds from that moneyholder.
That's the easy part. Now consider the following:
1. The system should be useable regardless of the participants countries of origin, even in countries that have a cash culture and little implementation of credit cards...
2. ... but must adhere to international and national legislation (looking at you, Russian/Iranian/Cuban sanction regime)
3. A certain level of anonymity is advisable. The newsman at the newsstand has no idea what my name or address is when I buy a newspaper, and neither should the micropayment merchant.
4. Transactions need to be failsafe and fast. I don't want to first click through four layers of login screens and read an email before I get to reading the article I was about to buy.
5. Somehow, whoever manages this system needs to make enough money to support infrastructure and engineers, plus a profit. (The most easy way would be to demand a 5% processing fee for sending money into the moneyholder... I can see that approach failing for psychological reasons, though ("I put 20 dollars in there, why is my balance only 19$?")
All current net payment schemes fail in one of these fields. Paypal is comparatively fast and ubiquitous, but fleeces people with their fees. Cryptocurrencies are often slow - and processing fees are no joke, not to being with the volatility issues. I think GNU Taler [1] is interesting, but that by necessity would become a regional solution linked to local banks at best.
[1] https://taler.net/en/index.html