Micro-payments: An Alternate to Adsense?

The success of the web has been it's being predominantly free. And with web2.0 coming in, it is more free than ever before. And how can you beat a craigslist, which is almost 100% free.
But the larger question is how sustainable is it? We will revisit Craigslist in a later post, and build a case around that, too - but later.

For now I wish to tackle the problem , as i perceive, of the business model of most web2.0 companies based on sweat, free content, and adsense revenue. Generate lots of traffic, and get people to go to other sites, so that you can make money. And people probably go to other sites that are similar. And I think this model is fundamentally flawed.

So I would like to turn the whole model on it's head. I would like to make the whole content paid. Yes. All content.

The whole web would work on micro payments. Visit a site, read a page - pay $0.001 cent or some such. The amount you pay could depend on user ratings, frequently visited, etc (just the way a lot of web2.0 works).

Of course there are tonnes of problems implementing such a system - has the page been read, should children not browse the net, payment a function of time spent on the page, cost of implementing micro-payments more than the payments, what is the payment aggregator (each of this will potentially become a post) - but it is not flawed like the model of getting people to go away from your shop, if you wish to make any money.