Most people are sick of ads and would happily pay 1/10 a cent to read a quality article, especially if the process was frictionless.
And most creators would love to keep their content open for everyone, but not have icky ads cluttering up their content.
I think you are underestimating how much micropayments will iron out a lot of problems for a lot of people.
Host your own scrapbook page (er, Facebook) for penny's without ads, tracking, manipulative promotion of content... People lose sight of the fact that Facebooks massive server farms are not really there to serve little posts, but to track and make predictions about people.
Those are just two ways
Another is people learning to support many causes they believe in with very small regular donations. I would voluntarily pay 1/10 cent for every wikipedia page I looked at, or 10 cents a week. Doesn't seem like much but that's $5.20 a year painlessly given.
Enough people do that and they could stop their annual funding drive.
They would also have just got an even clearer incentive to up the quality and usefulness of what they do. Greater efforts resulting in greater donations directly.
