I'm not saying it wouldn't benefit anyone. Just that the friction of paying for anything at all, assuming a reasonable level of security, is such that if I'm willing to pay $.01 I'm probably willing to pay $1. If I'm willing to pay $1 I'm more than 20% likely to be willing to pay $5. So the optimal pricing strategy would never be a micropayment.
This is why there's nothing funded by micropayments. (Unless you count free-to-play gaming where, for some reason, people refer to a $14 average purchase as a micropayment.)
If it were possible to lower the friction while maintaining security, that presumably would already be the case, as there is a HUGE financial incentive on the part of sellers.
"there is a HUGE financial incentive on the part of sellers"
At least up until now, there have been ad sales, which you can think of as an incredibly heath-robinson micropayment system: a small amount of what I pay for every product I buy goes to their marketing department, which passes on a smaller amount to advertising firms, which give it to websites. The viability of advertising largely removed the incentive to develop micropayment systems; hopefully that's now changing.
The most successful micropayment service of can think of is probably Spotify. It doesn't look how everyone was imagining micropayments but is effectively the same thing.
This is why there's nothing funded by micropayments. (Unless you count free-to-play gaming where, for some reason, people refer to a $14 average purchase as a micropayment.)
If it were possible to lower the friction while maintaining security, that presumably would already be the case, as there is a HUGE financial incentive on the part of sellers.