Adam Penenberg channels IDC IDG head Pat Kenealy (left, by Jay Sandred) on another of those occasional "you're going to have to pay for Web content someday" pieces we see every so often.

Well, he's right. But he's also wrong.

He's right because there's already some Web content people do pay for. Dow Jones loses reach and influence, but does make money selling online subscriptions. Lexis-Nexis and Dialog haven't gone free with the dawn of the Web. Last time I checked iTunes was selling songs online, at a profit.

He's wrong because he insists that "micro-payment technology" will stimulate the growth of pay-for-play content. We've been hearing that one for 10 years now, and it's as wrong now as it was in 1995.

There's already a micro-payment program in place. A very successful one.

It's called advertising.

Whether we're talking about simple banners and buttons, obnoxious full-page ads you have to click through, or even more-obnoxious crap that covers your content for 5-10 seconds (while you skillfully mouse-around and read later paragraphs to avoid it), advertising is a micro-payment technology that works.

How much is a publisher getting for his pages? A penny? A nickel? A dime? Well, it adds up. And for publishers like Google it adds up like no one's business.

There are regular experiments to see if we want to change, and most fail. Any time a publisher -- of Web content, of a game, of software -- lays down an offer of "pay $x and get no ads," that's a market test.

Those tests are still failing.

When they start succeeding, however, we still won't need your micro-payment technology. We'll have macro-money coming in.