I can't reply to the moneyflow article because I'm no longer an apprentice, so I'll comment here.

I recently read "The Case Against Micropayments" and found myself persuaded by it - mostly because I find myself that I'd much rather pay a flat rate for something than pay a few pennies repeatedly. I know how much "a few pennies at a time" can add up. And whenever any site (such as wsj.com) I encounter has a subscription model, I think instinctively that "they don't get it".

So what might happen instead? I can think of one scenario, combining a couple of ideas I've read elsewhere. I've heard many people say they'd gladly pay to get rid of ads on the pages they view. I can certainly imagine being prepared to pay X dollars a month for the privilege of ad-free surfing.

So how would such a thing be implemented? Well, DoubleClick could probably do such a thing unilaterally, or it could be implemented by a cooperative group of sites that use advertising. The principle would be that every time you visit a page on one of their sites, it first checks a cookie to decide whether you have paid or not. If you have, it doesn't serve you any ads.

The payment would have to be made to an external organization, and should ideally be someone who can be trusted not to track personal information. This entity can probably tell every site within their "network" that you visit, so you would need to trust them to not use that information for anything other than distributing the money.

Since each page access (or at least each browsing session) would have to involve a round-trip to the external organization's server, they can check how often you visit the site and give that site a corresponding proportion of the proceeds (ideally at the same rate as a single ad view would - or an appropriately weighted average of the rates for a clicked-through vs non-clicked-through ad).

Just a thought...