...(e.g. sending an automated $0.0001 microtransaction when they click read a blog or listen to some music)...
I'm aware of the logic about
why microtransactions won't work. But the cognitive load can be eliminated by, a) making the payments so small and automated, and b) making the payments a "game" that people want to be part of.
The common retort to asking people to pay for content on the Internet is that why would anyone pay for what they can get for free. My solution is to make it "free" to pay.
Also they can't get the (exact) same content for free else where, because the content providers want to be paid. They can get some other content else where for free, but not the exact same content. Then I have a mechanism by which they are already psychologically/socially invested into wanting the exact content that is not free. This also ties into the concept that it is a "game" (or social reward) of sorts.
Life is game. Everyone wants to be part of something. Everyone wants to feel something. Everyone wants a reason to be alive.
One thing to keep in mind is that many people (especially if we include the billions of people in the developing world) either don't have or aren't going to reach for their credit card or Paypal account to grab some content they may want. They'd maybe even be willing to pay that 25 cents for it, but it isn't worth the hassle of figuring out how to pay for it.
More details to follow...
P.S. An excellent ROI from advertising revenue is $0.001 per impression, but typically it is much lower than that. And that doesn't factor in the losses that advertising creates (such as sending the buying power else where and loosing your captured audience) and the loss of upsells+loyalty. For example, musicians make most of their revenue from upsells. So we shouldn't view the $0.001 microtransaction as the most economically relevant level. Probably it will be in the $0.05 or above (maybe even as high as $1) level that will be the most important economically. It may be the case that the $0.001 level is not even worth it. It may also vary given different content and monetization models. More holistically, advertising is a model that has a very low relevance (even with the best targeting). Thus the maximum economic value should be obtained not via advertising but via an organic, viral model of reaching consumers.
Some projects (e.g. Synereo and Yours.network, even to some extent Steemit) have suggested that paying curators is the best model for obtaining the maximum value of matching consumers to content. Rather I think an organic, viral model is superior wherein consumers share with other consumers for reasons of natural relevance, because the cognitive load on curation for profit is too high and not well matched to the finely grained free market annealing (optimization of fitness) of
chaos in the human network.