I'm still hoping that something like Flattr can work. It should be possible to have a middle ground between "everything is ad supported" and "everything requires subscriptions or credit cards", especially for niche "small" content (that don't take months or years to produce) where the audience can appreciate the work done and its value.
I hope Flattr or one of the others like it can work, but I think the habits of people who are now used to things being free, and who aren't likely to en-mass start voluntarily "tipping" authors, will be hard to change.
I don't know if that's even the biggest hurdle. The intractable problem I see is, any author who's good enough to convince people to sign up for Flattr in order to tip them has much better monetization options than Flattr. Flattr is only compelling to writers who are not themselves all that compelling.
There are other services besides Flattr that have their own good parts. For instance, Tip The Web (http://tiptheweb.org/) is a non-profit that serves as a hub for micropayments and maintains itself from tips without taking a cut.
