Related to the transaction costs problem: where are the bottlenecks here? I don't know myself (I assume the old farty banks and credit card companies just won't reduce their transaction fees, but I could be wrong). It shouldn't be that costly to do the bit shuffling that a couple cent transaction would require (hell, serving up the damn page probably requires hundreds of times more computational resources than the transaction would take), so why isn't anyone able to offer such services at an appropriate price?
You'd think Paypal, or Google, or someone would have enough clout to work out some deal with the credit card companies so that micropayments could be dealt with through pure percent-of-transaction fees (relatively high ones, even) instead of having fixed floors on the transaction costs...
The problem is not so much the computational resources. It's the other resources, especially the human resources required to deal with exceptional conditions. One common exceptional condition is fraud: Either the buyers will try to cheat you, or the vendors will try to cheat you, or certain buyers and vendors will get together and conspire to cheat you -- by, say, laundering money through your operation, which will be a problem for you when the IRS and the FBI come to audit your books.
Every transaction has a failure rate, and with such tiny transactions it takes a very low failure rate to destroy your margins. If one out of every ten thousand 1 cent transactions is fraudulent, or gets disputed and charged back by the customer, or fails verification, or sets off a fraud warning at someone's bank... and the resulting exception ends up costing more than $10 worth of time and resources to fix, that's 10 percent of the gross.
Here's another random fact: In the USA it now costs 44 cents to mail a first class letter weighing up to 1 ounce. That will typically allow you to mail 4 or 5 sheets of paper. Which means that it costs of order 10 cents just to mail a sheet of paper. One of my double-sided credit card bills seems to hold about 40 transactions, which implies that it costs about one-quarter of a cent just to mail the paper report of a single transaction. If the average transaction is for a couple of cents... the mailing costs to the credit card company are somewhere around 12.5% of the gross.
That's just one random example of a cost that doesn't scale uniformly downwards as transaction size goes down. There are many others. The cost of a transaction just isn't proportional to its size.
Obviously you can mark up a transaction enough to make it worthwhile. But if that markup is very high, your 2-cent-per-article micropayments operation will end up with a huge competitive disadvantage against someone who collects up articles into bundles and then sells the bundles for $1.99 apiece -- or, better yet, an annual payment of $23.99. We call those people publishers and editors.
You'd think Paypal, or Google, or someone would have enough clout to work out some deal with the credit card companies so that micropayments could be dealt with through pure percent-of-transaction fees (relatively high ones, even) instead of having fixed floors on the transaction costs...