The number of installs of adblocking software would seem to contradict you. Consumers are cheap and don't want to pay for things, but they also don't want to watch ads. They also don't want 15 $10 subscriptions to things they barely use. But they also want to support creators. So there's some intersection point where people are willing to put some money in, and receive fewer and less aggressive advertisements in exchange.
The answer is federation. Don't try to sell me "subscribing to one specific blog", sell me a sensibly curated and rich network.
People might be willing to pay $10 per month for a broad spectrum of quality content, but they don't want to spend 13 cents for a given arbitrary single article. It's an annoying decision burden, even if you try to shunt it away from them with delayed end-of-month billing (constant fear of a surprise $300 bill) or a prepaid-credit scheme (where you have to still check your balance regularly).
It has to be unmetered at the moment of use -- no surprise paywall popping back up-- and it has to cover enough content that you're not reliant on "if we lose our #1 draw, the entire platform falls over".
The perfect prototype was basically the Japanese phone-book manga magazine. If you liked one or two series consistently, it was enough to justify buying the book, and since you already paid, you may as well explore the other 18 series in there to see if there's something you like.
There was something similar with Coil.com, based on the Web Monetisation API. Basically you paid $5/month, and it was shared on a pro-rata basis between on content you consumed that supported the API. Coil themselves had content lists on their website to discover, but the goal was for the monetisation to happen organically.
Most companies fail. But I think something like that could work.
It's what Google Contributor should have been. Not the bizarre v1 where your money tried to outbid ads, or the pay-per-view v2 that also only supported a handful of websites.
Google Contributor was dead on arrival by the usual issue of launching ... too small.
It could never get a following because the initial set of providers and customers would be always too limited to gain proper usage numbers which in turn would prevent it from being expanded.
There was also flattr by brokep (one of the Pirate Bay guys), which basically gave you a like button to put on your blog, and your monthly payment was split between all your likes.
