History says it matters.<p>Make the individual item payments small enough, and quite literally, <i>it isn&#x27;t worth my time to have to decide on the value</i>.  You see, <i>transaction costs</i> matter, and the actual price paid itself is a very small component.
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Transaction_costs" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Transaction_costs</a><p>Again: the amount of money necessary <i>to eliminate advertising completely</i> is all but inconsequential.  The frictions, costs, inefficiencies, and negative externalities of fractional-mill per-page costs would be stupidly inefficient.<p>E.g., I can read ~50-100 web pages&#x2F;day.  That&#x27;s, roughly, 36,000 pages, tops, per year, or $0.002 per page.  Should I really have to decide <i>one hundred times a day</i> if a page was worth reading?<p>And to what end?<p>If I&#x27;m broke enough that that&#x27;s a concern, then there&#x27;s a tremendous social <i>inequity</i> in denying me the information.<p>If I&#x27;m rich enough that it&#x27;s <i>not</i> a concern, just bill me the 0.33% out of my income tax that it would cost to provide this.  I don&#x27;t care, literally, <i>it isn&#x27;t worth my time</i>, and I&#x27;m subsidising access for the poor in my own country and around the world.<p>My whole point is that markets and information are exceptionally poorly suited.  I&#x27;ve considered your arguments and rejected them.<p>Water, incidentally, is another case where the <i>infrastructure</i>, that is, <i>fixed</i> costs hugely outweight the <i>marginal</i> costs of delivery in most cases.