That assumes either all sites on the web deserve equal compensation for their acts, or some body can decide what the relative value of each is and compensate each creator accordingly. You’d go back to having click farms, but they’d claim the government owes them a billion dollars for their high traffic.

Even the government would usually prefer that citizen money go directly to the systems that they prefer to support, rather than go through taxes to a government program that sponsors them (that’s why you get tax deduction for transit usage and charities). That second route is just needlessly complex.

There’s also better models for payment than microcharges. No one wants to consciously spend 5 cents in an online action. YouTube could require users to be subscribers to view or upload certain forms of content, or each individual creator would integrate some form of Patreon setup. A really simple solution would be to divide someone’s monthly subscription fee based on who they watched most that month.

My neato.

Guy replies with a hyperbolic shitpost about capitalism.

OP replies sincerely.

I reply hyperbolically in turn.

You assume I'm serious, then assume media can only mean "the mass news media" while ignoring any subtler parallels about access to information and adoption. (e.g. Does reading and writing being expensive relate to the early internet where access and hosting were expensive? Does the evolution of the written word have parallels with the evolution of the internet?)

If I'm responding semi-seriously, I do want to note that it's only in the American school system where there's no writing until the west gets paper. Armies of scribes carved into stone, impressed into clay, and wrote onto vellum to blanket empires in written news.