I feel like that's where online payment systems really let us down. If there was an easy universal way to pay a few cents to view content and it wasn't a privacy and fee nightmare, I'm sure people would have no problem doing that. Digicash systems come to mind, I hope they could make a comeback one day.
But I also fear a lot of the damage could've been done already, kids who grow up with the internet now will probably only remember big tech platforms and may not be very eager to try out something more complicated.
This is actually pissing me off, Twitch was already bleeding out with some moving over to YouTube, it deems like they're completely out of touch and about to just give up on their position. So the new situation will be, we have one giant instead of two, everything will be Google.