Bah. Images are the evil, not text. I can make 500 characters fit in a ~700x100 space, which is less screen real estate vertically than my current signature. Sure people post poems, song lyrics, and other things that generally stick < 20 characters per line, but these people are told to quit. I just get frustrated when my signature is 200 pixels tall but I can't fit the quote I want because the link URLs and image URLs take up 2/3 of my character limit.
Anyway, I still say premium is a good idea, search is worth it. I was going to whine about it being a recurring fee, but then I remembered the places that charge a one-time fee for stuff like this have ad banners and charge for avatars and such, so this makes sense.
Oh and Jiggly:
1) I'm pretty certain PayPal requires a credit card, but then they turn around and want you to put bank info in to verify so it may be possible to do it without a credit card.
2) I'm also fairly certain that PayPal does currency conversion, as well. When it goes to fetch your money it will just request the equivalent of 7.50 USD.
So in short, I don't know, but I do have good guesses :)