You can make pennies per article with adsense ads at no direct cost to your audience and people use ad blocker rampantly. You can also use PayPal to give as little as a dollar. I have sites with PayPal tip jars. When people tip, they rarely leave only one dollar. Those that tip usually are more generous than that.
I'm quite convinced that people wanting micropayments to be solved are pretty much like friends who say they would give you money if they won the lottery. In other words, these are people who just don't want to do anything for you, but don't want to admit to that. So they latch onto some implausible scenario and enthusiastically swear up and down that should lightening strike, they will absolutely do X, knowing the odds are very long against that happening.
