Longer. Microtransactions online dates back to DigiCash[1], founded in 1989 and with their first issue online of "CyberCash" in 1994 - I remember testing it at university briefly. When microtransactions quickly started turning out to be cumbersome on an individual basis that quickly made some people pivot to the idea of bundling on the user side and have the system pay it out with microtransactions on the publisher side...

I agree with the caveats you outline, though. I think to work, something like this would need to be a box you'd tick when signing up for your ISP that promised some "ad free premium access to [X number] of sites" or similar, and you'd trade entirely on it being big name sites. Even then I'd expect relatively limited takeup mostly from people unaware of ad blockers.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DigiCash

The problem is that the choice isn't seeing ads v.s. paying for the content. Instead, the choice is seeing ads v.s. overpaying for the content, then seeing ads anyway when the service decides to indroduce ads back to the paid subscription. By overpaying, I mean compared to what the service itself values its content at when it serves it for free with ads.

How many people would sign up for a 15$ per month subscription to read one article with no ads? How many would pay 1¢ once to read the article with no ads? How many would sign up for one 15$ per month subscription to see no ads anywhere?

I realize we don't have the infrastructure to make high volume 1¢ payments, and probably not for lack of trying, but I just don't think the core problem is that people only want stuff for 0¢ and not almost 0¢.

The problem is I don't want surveillance and I don't want to incentivize trying to distract me (the "attention economy"). "Creators" just don't want to acknowledge that much of their "content" has zero or negative value to most people, and instead claim that everyone just wants free stuff. No, I want most of these "creators" to stop creating.

> free stuff with no strings attached

I'm aware I'm preaching to the choir here on HN, but boy are there strings...

I don't think that's the case. I think the problem is that the sort of market behavior that would drive a company to run invasive ads in the first place betrays its fundamental lack of respect for its users. I want to pay for stuff. And I have tried. Even in doing so, I've found piracy is still often the superior service to using what I'm actually paying for.