Even $0.1 per day is too much for the person with $100/mo disposable income to continue browsing with the freedom to browse they have now.

Sure, for one site, that $3/mo will not break the bank.

But being limited to only $100/$3 = 33 sites a month would be quite constraining.

When I'm reading about a topic or searching for a purchase, I'll typically visit that many sites in one session. Over the course of a month it is normal to visit hundreds of sites (I have counted for auditing a job), sometimes over a thousand. That's without giving it any thought, just following links and reading linked content.

(Heck, when reading HN I sometimes read more than 33 HN stories in a single sitting, but to be fair I don't often follow the links to the articles themselves ;-)

If I had to monitor my usage to keep it down to 33 sites in a month, I could do that but it would be a very different reading experience than I currently have.

Like back in the days when we had to pay per minute of online access (outside the US, using audio modems). The change to a single monthly subscription with the freedom to read as much as you want, as long as you want, was liberating and transformative. It would be a little sad to go back to having to self-police reading in order to keep costs down.

In your scenario they need ten times the free users to get the same revenue as one paying customer yields. Presumably, for most services we’re talking about here the marginal cost of having one user versus ten is probably negligable. It doesn’t seem unlikely to me that if a sevice starts charging, 90% of the users drop off, and thus the revenue per user needs to increase commensurately in order to have the same profits.

Of course this is totally made up, so it’s impossible to argue about, but my point is that what you described didn’t necessarily seem out of line to me.

I wonder how much banks are the problem here. I am not sure if payments of a few cents can be realized online without loosing money on fees to payment providers or banks.

AFAIK, this is the "micropayment" problem, that people were hoping bitcoin would solve.

I think part of this is about an inability to market discriminate effectively. Some people will likely make the website much more money (whales), but if they can't capture that difference with their pricing they'll be making less.

Moreover, running a site with ads and tracking has higher hosting costs than a cleaner one that just serves contents to paying customers.